Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Revenants in fiction


 * 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 delete. Doczilla @SUPERHEROLOGIST 08:10, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Revenants in fiction

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

Fails WP:LISTN and WP:INDISCRIMINATE as a pure example farm that is almost entirely original research. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 14:48, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements, Science fiction and fantasy,  and Lists.  ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 14:48, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete pure fancruft, not a hint of scholarly discussion. Dronebogus (talk) 15:27, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete - Completely made up of trivia, with no actual discussion on the topic or any kind of legitimate sources. Nearly all of the entries are non-notable, and there are huge amounts of WP:OR going on here for a lot of them. Rorshacma (talk) 16:29, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment: While I agree that the article in its current state is an indiscriminate list of unsourced and disjointed examples, I think there is a concept here which could be notable, if we could locate decent sources. For example, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy has an article on revenants. /Julle (talk) 16:35, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * WP:TNT applies; the article could be rewritten as something decent, but there is no point in keeping it as it stands Dronebogus (talk) 16:40, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * If you take another look, you will see that it no longer resembles the article that was taken to AfD. (: I hope someone else will be able to edit it further; I don't have as much time to spend on it as I'd have preferred. /Julle (talk) 16:45, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * While I applaud your efforts, the problem now is that what is left without the list of trivia is basically the exact same topic as the main Revenant article, and thus there is still no actual reason for this to exist as a separate topic. Rorshacma (talk) 16:47, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Removing the list turns it into a WP:DICDEF. Different issue, same conclusion. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 16:54, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Revenant is about the folkloristic concept, though, with discussions about various mythological undead like the draugr. The consciously fictional concept, used in literature rather than folklore, seems different enouh, to me, to fit better in a separate article. Ashley's SFE article, for example, avoids the mythological even to explain the background, and focuses solely on the literary. We could, of course, add the fantasy revenants to the revenant article instead, but since they migth better be understood as two related but separate traditions and concepts I wonder if that's the best solution? /Julle (talk) 17:07, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I believe an article move to Revenant (monster) would be in order if this article ends up being rewritten, much like the Gargoyle (monster) article that I made a while ago. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 17:55, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Works for me. I have no strong opinions on the title, I just feel a) we can probably make something of this and b) I think it works better treated as a separate concept. /Julle (talk) 18:09, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment - That really is the central issue of the many "In Popular Culture" lists on Wikipedia. In many cases, there is a potentially notable topic behind it, but the lists are most certainly not an appropriate way to cover it, and do not contain any actually sourced material that would be useful in developing a prose article. Additionally, a lot of times, there is not even a real reason for the "portrayal in media" subject to even be split out of the main article if it were not just a overly long list of non-notable trivia. This one is a perfect example of that - the Revenant article is not particularly long, so adding a short section discussing the topic in prose format using sources like the one you presented would certainly be preferable over this separate, messy trivia list. Rorshacma (talk) 16:46, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, I took a look at some sources I've used to salvage similar articles (see e.g. Articles for deletion/Genies in popular culture (2nd nomination) and Articles for deletion/Loch Ness Monster in popular culture (2nd nomination)). I was most hopeful that The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock) might have an entry, but it didn't (it instead refers to the "Monsters in Video Games" entry, where the only mention is in the sentence Doom is is particularly renowned for its monster design, with monsters like the revenant, hellknight, and the end boss Cyberdemon regularly noted as iconic monsters of video gaming.). I also thought Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares (edited by S. T. Joshi) might have an entry, but it didn't. I found no relevant entry in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (edited by Gary Westfahl) or the other sources I checked either. There's nothing wrong with the entry in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy discovered by of course, but we would need more than that to write a decent article on this. TompaDompa (talk) 18:38, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge to revenant. There is some decent stuff here and if someone wants to recreate the article one day when its needed due to the main articles size then they can do that, as of now both are too short for it to be really necessary.★Trekker (talk) 07:46, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete or redirect to the main article. The current content seems particularly useless and there's no immediate sign of improvement, so I'd say start from scratch in the main article if the topic does have any potential. TTN (talk) 14:15, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete: The old article was a list of trivia. The current one is a dictionary definition. Regardless, there in nothing worth preserving here. It needs to be destroyed so that something else can be built. &#8213; Susmuffin Talk 17:17, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge. SFE entry is reliable, but more would be needed. I am concerned whether this is not overlapping with some similar concepts, frankly, the entire concept of revenant is fuzzy. For now I'd merge this to said article (revenant), it's not like it's long, and source discussion above doesn't inspire hopes that we will find much. Ps. From article on revenant: "The term "revenant" has been used interchangeably with "ghost" by folklorists. While some maintain that vampires derive from Eastern European folklore and revenants derive from Western European folklore, many assert that revenant is a generic term for the undead". Ghosts in fiction/Ghosts in popular culture would be another valid target (it's surprising those are red links...). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:10, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Popular culture-related deletion discussions. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  09:26, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Selective Merge to Revenant. There does appear to be some secondary coverage of this topic, but clearly not enough to justify a WP:SPLIT from the main article. Devonian Wombat (talk) 23:27, 5 August 2022 (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.