Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Petit Apple Pie


 * 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. (non-admin closure) Tim Song (talk) 01:18, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Petit Apple Pie

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Unnotable manga series. Fails WP:BK and WP:N. Prodded in January and it was asserted that it was notable and the prod removed. Article tagged for notability. No other sources have been produced since then, just the single reliable source that has been there the whole time. Its length alone does not make it notable. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 02:25, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Anime and manga-related deletion discussions. — --  AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 02:26, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep. As there is a review in Animage, and there are 18 volumes in the series which spanned 5 years, it is extremely likely there are other sources out there. However, due to the age of the series, it is very difficult to find those sources as they are going to be only offline sources. This crusade of yours against this article is getting old, Collectonian. ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿  · Talk to Nihonjoe 02:38, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep This is an obvious, common-sense Keep. An 18-volume work printed over 5 years by a notable publisher is highly unlikely not to have generated some coverage. A comparable, contemporary work printed in the US would be easy to source. Because of the age of these books, their printing in Japan, and the tendency of Japanese press to stay off the Internet, this sourcing will be difficult to find. Insisting that something like this pass the same standards as articles on current/US pop culture would result in biased coverage of pop culture on Wikipedia. And we're against that, right? Otis Criblecoblis (talk) 02:53, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * (EC) Insisting it pass the same standards as any other manga series is not biased. It's length alone does not make its notable. WP:BK does say "long series" = notable. More than enough time has been given for sources to be found. The article is basically a copy of the same article on the JA wiki with the OR paragraph removed, and one source added. It has not expanded or improved in 2 years. What else is to say about it except that it exists? Its age is not a pass. I've found more than enough reliable sources on German novels published in 1923, while speaking and reading no German, to write full articles. Other foreign works of varying ages have produced appropriate, reliable sources. Its being Japanese is not a pass either. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 03:05, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You've obviously never been to Japan if you think it's that easy to find print articles from nearly 25 years ago. Japan is about 10 years behind the States when it comes to putting old content online, so until (or if) they put it online, the only way to find these things is to try to find magazines and newspapers from that era which would cover topics such as this. It's really not as easy as you think it is. ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿  · Talk to Nihonjoe 03:22, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You should of course feel free to create articles on German novels published in 1923. -- Hoary (talk) 10:42, 11 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment: I just found that WP:BK actually addresses this point here. To quote: "From a pragmatic standpoint, the vast majority of books upon which articles are written which invite a notability judgment call and which find their way to articles for deletion, are from the modern era. Nevertheless, the notability of books written or published much earlier may occasionally be disputed and the criteria proposed above intended primarily for modern books may not be as suitable. We suggest instead a more common sense approach which considers whether the book has been widely cited or written about, whether it has been recently reprinted, the fame that the book enjoyed in the past and its place in the history of literature." So, a super-strict interpretation of the main points in WP:BK would seem to out of order in this case as this series is not contemporary and not in English, thereby making sources that much harder to find. ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿  · Talk to Nihonjoe 02:59, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It is not that old. It was published in the 80s. That is still fairly contemporary. Trying to claim its too old for sourcing is a a cheap argument, IMHO. If it were from the early 1900s, yeah, but 20 years is still contemporary. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 03:05, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * See my comments above. You don't seem to have experience trying to find old magazine articles in Japan or you would know that 25 years is quite a long time and printed information from that period is exponentially more difficult to locate than such things about contemporary (within the last 10-15 years) topics. You don't know what you're talking about here. You really don't. ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿  · Talk to Nihonjoe 03:22, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * . Contemporary time is generally 1945 to the present, not just the last 10-15 years. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 03:23, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * For movies or historical events. Twenty years is a lifetime in manga -- even barring the substantial difficulties sourcing things that age, it's only in the last decade that mainstream publications began to take manga seriously. At the time this was published, it would certainly have received coverage from appropriate sources, but ones even less likely to make their content available than the already frustratingly reluctant major press. There is a ton of coverage for this type of series available in older magazines and in nonfiction books that are long out of print and nigh impossible to find. Barring an obvious reason for claiming something is non-notable -- cancellation, lack of JA Wikipedia article, lack of any sources -- we need to view articles like this with a more lenient eye, or we're simply end up biased heavily in favor of modern series. Keep. Doceirias (talk) 03:34, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * 25 years is quite a long time and printed information from that period is exponentially more difficult to locate than such things about contemporary (within the last 10-15 years) topics. Maybe true for libraries; for the web, this risks giving the impression that reliable sources in Japanese about topics that are just ten years old are easy to find: they're not. All in all, Nihonjoe errs on the side of understatement. -- Hoary (talk) 06:55, 10 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep Holding manga to the ridiculous standards of coverage, which other media may get, but you know most manga never well, is ridiculous. The series ran for five years, had 18 volumes published collecting its work, and had many notable manga writers working on it.  Common sense Keep.   D r e a m Focus  03:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment It is indeed not obvious that this series meets any of the criteria in the nutshell version of WP:BK. But WP:BK, though no doubt well intended, is rather a mess. Consider for example: Books should have at a minimum an ISBN number (for books published after 1966), be available at a dozen or more libraries and be catalogued by its country of origin's official or de facto national library. In Japan, ISBNs were used only very patchily till twenty years or so later, certain publishers (and even certain kinds of books) still avoid ISBNs, and the NDL has not acquired (and still seems uninterested in) great swathes of books that draw critical commentary. Still, WP:BK goes some way to redeeming itself with sensible remarks on the "non-contemporary". -- Hoary (talk) 06:55, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment Additional, unconventional sourcery here at Yafuoku. This is of course not citable for the article itself, but some of it may be worth considering in this AfD as additional quasi-evidence for the very modest claims made in the article. -- Hoary (talk) 10:38, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Add those two trustworthy but probably not RS. I should note that those books have no ISBN . --KrebMarkt 11:52, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment Im with Collectonian, if there ARE R.S here then why havent they been put into the article and why does a tag from January 2009 remain? In my opinion tags are little warnings that should alert people to things like this further down the road. On the other hand this is an old manga and Japan is behind when it comes to things like this. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 21:13, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Please read the various comments above as they explain why further sources haven't been added. It mainly has to do with your last sentence and the fact that finding printed sources (which is all that existed at that time) is extremely difficult for someone not in Japan (and very difficult for someone in Japan). ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿  · Talk to Nihonjoe 02:58, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Nihonjoe's responses appear reasonable to anyone who wishes to be reasonable. 18 volumes of lolicon material in the 80s, sometimes I wish wikipedia wasn't quite as educational. XD Kyaa the Catlord (talk) 11:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Not to mention it's 18 volumes of non-erotic lolicon material from the 80s. Even more of a rarity. ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿  · Talk to Nihonjoe 14:08, 11 November 2009 (UTC)


 * That series received at least one review from an unquestionable RS, Animage. Being only released in Japan makes further research of RS coverage difficult. Japan is not know to bring their archive/old stuff on the web but is rather know to delete stuff no more "current" see how Animate website works. More aggravating is the time frame of this series which makes it too recent to have any historical interest and thus made into digital archive or subject to scholars papers, and too old to have received benefit from the Internet boom. 25 years is a lot of time. Back then we were still in Cold war and Nelson Mandela was still in jail. To conclude on that part it's clearly daunting to find more coverage. That article does not comply of any of the five criterion of WP:BK however i have confidence that this article would comply WP:BK #1 if circumstances were not that dire, so my vote is Keep. Furthermore, on whole project side view having few somewhat "jury rigged" articles rather than "real holes" in our coverage of 80's manga is an acceptable trade-off. —Preceding unsigned comment added by KrebMarkt (talk • contribs)
 * Keep Agree with others that early 80s is far enough in the past to make tracking down RSs difficult. Use of non-contemporary/older works guidelines seems prudent. Argel1200 (talk) 23:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. The series is very, very dead, and the books within it are available very cheaply. Thus any assertion of notability that might be inferred from the very existence of an en:WP article doesn't raise the slightest suspicion of conflict of interest (something that can't be said for many articles on books (e.g. Half-Life). As for assertions of notability (implicit or explicit) within the article, we're just told that Tokuma (a notable company that deserves a far better en:WP article than it gets) put out 18 volumes, which (with my extremely limited knowledge of manga) seems quite a lot. The rest, of which there is little, is flat description, which in no way aggrandizes the production. It's sourced to two places: (i) an article in a magazine put out by Tokuma itself and (ii) a page (actually a couple of pages) of a website. The former doesn't sound good, but the magazine (which I don't think I've ever seen) does sound authoritative in its way and certainly an article in Comics Journal (from Fantagraphics) would be a good source for factual information about (if not assertions of significance of) a publication from Fantagraphics. The latter is from burikko.net, a site I hadn't previously heard of (and one that reminds me yet again that much of Japanese "popular culture" will always be utterly alien to me). It's unclear who created the website or why its content should be credible; I'd look askance at any attempt in WP to source assertions of significance or merit to this website, but these two pages are no more than flat descriptions of the contents of each of the 18 books, and I see no particular reason to question their accuracy. So all in all the sources seem adequate to their careful application in this modest article. -- Hoary (talk) 01:18, 14 November 2009 (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.