Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ruth Traill


 * 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. and Rename Ruth the Betrayer, although participation in this discussion was low and the 'delete' opinions outnumbered the 'keep', PWilkinson has found a better search term and his rationale was not refuted. J04n(talk page) 10:49, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Ruth Traill

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There have been doubts about this article since it was created; the earliest versions seem to have been researched out of the British Library acquisitions list or something, and it's only in some of the most recent versions that it is sourced to something that resembles a secondary source. Presently it references a Times Literary Supplement article that is hidden behind a paywall; however I have also found a letter to the NYT from the person who wrote the TLS article. After that things get very problematic: almost every other repetition of this claim is in a blog or is a copy of our article, and it seems entirely possible that most if not all of those blog claims trace back to us as well. I'm not convinced that the author of our article isn't the author of the TLS/NYT article and letter. Legitimate GBook hits are all on the book itself. I should note that the article title is wrong: there is a "Ruth Traill" who appears to be a real person unrelated to the book, but the character in the book uses only one L in the last name. I'm extremely reluctant to have an article whose only notability claim arises out of a somewhat passing assertion in a book review. Mangoe (talk) 13:37, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete Per nom. The sources may not be independent, and notability does not appear to be satisfied. A claim of something being "first" is not sufficient for inclusion absent adequate coverage by reliable and independent secondary sources. Edison (talk) 18:25, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 13:42, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 13:42, 20 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep, but rename to Ruth the Betrayer (the title of the book she appears in). The nominator's suspicions about the article seem to be largely right - but with a slight twist. So far as I can see, what looks to have happened is that the author of some books on Victorian social history got involved with a Wikipedia Editathon at the British Library while researching for her next book. As a Wikipedia editor, she was a complete newbie, and it looks as if she created the article directly from her research notes. However, that next book has now been published by HarperCollins, and looks (given the publisher, reviews in major British newspapers and her previous publication record) like a reasonably reliable source - and I have revised a couple of citations in the article to refer to it. Other apparently reliable sources can be identified (and do need to be included in the article by someone with access to them) by searching on the title of the book, particularly on GBooks (past the first page), rather than the character - even if, unfortunately, the most promising ones seem to be either on snippet view or no preview at all (though the available snippet from The encyclopedia of fantastic victoriana suggests a substantial and contrasting treatment of the subject. PWilkinson (talk) 13:00, 23 February 2013 (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.