Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tachyons in fiction (2nd nomination)


 * 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 no consensus‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. As regards keep or merge; there is consensus to not delete. A new merger discussion can be started if desired.  Sandstein  19:37, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Tachyons in fiction
AfDs for this article:


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

Like many 'in fiction' and like topics, there is a chance this is a notable topic (a good one, given sources like ). Unfortunately, our current execution is simply terrible. Just three footnotes. A WP:OR prose opening with no source, followed by a gigantic list of random works that mention this topic that fails WP:IPC/MOS:TRIVIA. This needs to be rewritten from scratch, as nothing here is rescuable, or in other words, this merits a WP:TNT treatment, although a WP:ATD-R alternative is to redirect this to Tachyon, from which it was spun long time ago. The short section there is at least referenced, if poorly - but still better than what we have here. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:13, 10 March 2024 (UTC) Relisting comment: To determine whether to keep this now-stub or to merge it as proposed. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   17:51, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements, Science fiction and fantasy, Popular culture,  and Lists. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  10:13, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Provisional Keep until and unless the nomination statement is amended to remove references to the manual of style. MOS is for how we present information, not what information to be presented. Thus, any AfD nomination statement which makes reference to the MOS does not support deletion. Ping me if it's corrected. Jclemens (talk) 15:56, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * You are not correct. The nomination statement supports deletion due to issues such as OR. As well as failure of WP:V. And from Manual of Style/Trivia sections: "Other policies apply. Trivia sections found in other publications outside Wikipedia (such as IMDb) may contain speculation, rumor, invented "facts", or even libel. However, trivia sections (and others) in Wikipedia articles must not contain those, and their content must be maintained in accordance with Wikipedia's other policies. An item's degree of potential public interest will not excuse it from being subject to rules like verifiability, neutral point-of-view, or no original research." And this article fails all of those (well, NPOV, perhaps not so much). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:08, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Every issue you cite from the MOS is correctable by editing, proving my point that MOS arguments are irrelevant to deletion discussions. Jclemens (talk) 05:26, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * If by editing you mean blanking, I do not see a difference. And how else are we supposed to fix it? By sourcing? Well, most of the content here is unlikely to be sourceable to anything reliable and will need to be deleted, as rewrites time and again have shown (rewrites of similar topics done by me or User:TompaDompa, fo rexample). Right now we have an unsourced, ORish collection of trivia that needs to go. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 05:28, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * MOS:POPCULT says Cultural references about a subject should not be included simply because they exist. A Wikipedia article may include a subject's cultural impact by summarizing its coverage in reliable secondary or tertiary sources (e.g., a dictionary or encyclopedia). A source should cover the subject's cultural impact in some depth; it should not be a source that merely mentions the subject's appearance in a movie, song, television show, or other cultural item. This is a restatement of WP:PROPORTION for a specific context. TompaDompa (talk) 05:32, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep Per above. The article itself has severe no issues. Georgethedragonslayer (talk) 17:58, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete Frankly, I'm surprised the tachyons article has such extensive, decent sourcing. We don't need an article about a fictional particle's appearances in media, it can be covered in a few sentences in the tachyon article. I'm not seeing notability for this fork. Oaktree b (talk) 01:05, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep The WP:OR/WP:V problem can be solved by cutting out the relatively small part in the introductory section which is not based on either secondary or primary sources (while probably most of what's based on primary sources there is better suited further down). The abundant sources found in the Google Books search both show that the topic is notable and can be used to go through the article, fulfilling the suggestions of MOS:POPCULT quoted above and trimming the rest of the examples. In my personal experience, the current list of appearances (bad because it lacks secondary sources and commentary) can be helpful in looking for more appropriate secondary sources if someone is willing to put in the effort. So failing that, I'd prefer a merge to deletion, so that on the one hand the list is at least preserved in the history for future improvement, and on the other hand the meager content supported by the three existing secondary sources can be used to the improve the even more meager content supported by one secondary source at Tachyon. Daranios (talk) 16:20, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment I have removed material that lacked proper sourcing. Two sentences remain. If somebody feels up to the task of expanding the article during the course of the WP:AfD discussion based on proper sources that would be great, though I don't personally anticipate finding the time to do so. Failing that, I don't see much of a case for keeping a stand-alone article as opposed to redirecting/merging to Tachyon—expansion can always be done at the latter and a split performed at a later stage. The material that was removed can be viewed via the article history, should anybody find that useful for locating sources as suggested above—though I would add that in my experience, that approach tends to skew the balance of WP:ASPECTS away from the relative weight given by sources on the overarching topic and towards the biases of Wikipedia's editors. TompaDompa (talk) 17:10, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Alright, I've taken a cursory look at a handful of sources and added some of them to Tachyons in fiction. Going by those sources, authors (even when ostensibly discussing tachyons in a science fiction context) focus on tachyons as a theoretical concept much more than as a fictional one, and the principal tachyon-related work of fiction seems to be Gregory Benford's Timescape (1980). These sources could probably be used to write at least a bit more on the topic; the article is well and truly a stub at the moment. TompaDompa (talk) 18:44, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * You deleted almost the entire article. This was a list of tachyons in fiction, just didn't have the "list of" in its name.  You should've just let it be deleted at AFD if it was decided it shouldn't exist, instead of deleting it while the AFD was still going.   D r e a m Focus  16:43, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I cleaned the article up so it could be (1) improved unencumbered by the dead weight of material that would for lack of proper sourcing need to removed regardless, or alternately (2) merged without removing that same material during or after the merge. This is a tried-and-tested way of improving these kinds of articles; see WP:Articles for deletion/Eco-terrorism in fiction, WP:Articles for deletion/Earth in science fiction (2nd nomination), WP:Articles for deletion/Space stations and habitats in fiction, WP:Articles for deletion/Supernovae in fiction, WP:Articles for deletion/Neptune in fiction, WP:Articles for deletion/Genies in popular culture (2nd nomination), WP:Articles for deletion/Battle of Thermopylae in popular culture, WP:Articles for deletion/Loch Ness Monster in popular culture (2nd nomination), and WP:Articles for deletion/Time viewer for examples of similar articles I have cleaned up and rewritten during AfD discussions. Improvement is preferable to deletion and it seems unlikely that the outcome of this discussion would have been "delete" rather than at minimum "redirect" anyway. You should welcome this approach. TompaDompa (talk) 16:54, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
 * As a list it obviously failed WP:NLIST. Where else outside Wikipedia and possibly TV Tropes can one find a "list of works in fiction that mention the word tachyon"? This was unencyclopedic fancruft. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 00:40, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * A List of tachyons in fiction on the other hand, meaning relevant appearances of tachyons in fiction as attested by secondary sources, would fulfill WP:NLIST! As usual, I would have gone around the other way and would have first referenced, then trimmed, but sourcing, adding commentary and trimming are relevant steps to solve indicated problems. So for me the question is if a prose article, such as it has been started now, can support all relevant instances, or if a complementary list, the better version of what we had before, might be beneficial. I could envision both cases. Daranios (talk) 11:20, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * A good approximation for when a list article on these kinds of fiction-related topics might be beneficial in addition to a prose article is "never". There is no need for a prose article to support all relevant instances, what it needs to do is present the information in line with WP:PROPORTION, i.e. treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject. A list article still needs to do that, but also needs to have proper WP:LISTCRITERIA that are unambiguous, objective, and supported by reliable sources. Experience tells us that the list format itself encourages the addition of content that lacks proper sourcing. This is likely because of an impulse to get the list closer to being "complete"/exhaustive, but without any consideration of relative importance to the overall topic doing so of course does not result in a proper list article but more of an index or catalogue—something more appropriate for TV Tropes or Wikia/Fandom (or possibly a category).Regarding the more general case: I try to imagine what a WP:Featured list of that kind would look like, and I keep running into a few problems, mainly where to put the threshold for inclusion and what/how much information to present about each entry. Both of those things need to reflect the sources on the topic and maintain a proper balance of WP:ASPECTS. I think it's pretty clear that in most cases we cannot present an exhaustive set of X in fiction/popular culture/whatever, so we need to establish some sort of inclusion (and perhaps also exclusion) criteria that are unambiguous, objective, and supported by reliable sources per WP:LISTCRITERIA. Likewise, each entry would need to provide sufficient context to explain how and why it is an example of X in fiction/popular culture/whatever that should appear on the list without being disproportionate either in the context of that particular entry or compared to other entries. All the while we need to avoid performing any editorial WP:ANALYSIS or interpretation of the works themselves. This would not, to put it mildly, be trivial, and it puts extremely high requirements on the sources. Such sources, I daresay, simply do not exist for these topics (or at least the majority of them). If we fundamentally cannot even in principle bring an article up to WP:Featured content standards, then we should not have such an article in the first place (which is not to say that the topic should not be covered on Wikipedia in some other form on some other article). On the other hand, we have no fewer than three WP:Featured articles on such topics: Mars in fiction, Venus in fiction, and Sun in fiction. TompaDompa (talk) 12:40, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I might also add that WP:NLIST is neither uncomplicated nor uncontroversial. The exact text is Notability guidelines also apply to the creation of stand-alone lists and tables. Notability of lists (whether titled as "List of Xs" or "Xs") is based on the group. One accepted reason why a list topic is considered notable is if it has been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources [...] There is no present consensus for how to assess the notability of more complex and cross-categorization lists (such as "Lists of X of Y") or what other criteria may justify the notability of stand-alone lists. I would not say, for instance, that the "Tachyons" entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction discusses the proposed list topic (be it called list of tachyons in fiction, list of appearances of tachyons in fiction, works of fiction featuring tachyons, or whatever) "as a group or set", though I would say that it discusses the overall topic tachyons in fiction in the general/abstract; others may disagree. TompaDompa (talk) 12:51, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, I would be one who'd disagree to the SF Encyclopedia article not discussing appearances of tachyons in fiction as a group. I would also be satisfied with the relatively simple, if not completely concise, list critereon to include any work where the use of tachyons is discussed by a reliable secondary source in non-trivial manner, i.e. beyond simply stating that they "mention the word tachyon", as has phrased it. Having such a list near-complete (with regard to available secondary sources) and fine-balancing the extent of discussion of each appearance between and within secondary source would then be the, admittedly hard, work of someone wanting to get this to a featured list. Anyway, I personally am not planning on creating/spinning out/recreating from the old article such a list. I only want to add a bit more on the prose article and don't expect to reach any limit there. Daranios (talk) 15:47, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Those are possible inclusion criteria, though it needs must be said that they are very inclusive and would result in (what by the balance of the sources are) very minor examples going on the list along with the foremost ones. This is an example of what I mean by not considering the relative importance to the overall topic. As I said above, it becomes more of a catalogue or index than a meaningfully crafted list article. One might also, less charitably, describe it as an exercise in stamp collecting. I can't say I see the point in creating or indeed retaining this kind of uncurated list in mainspace (as opposed to on an external wiki, blog, or a self-maintaining category). It is, to be frank, a recipe for extremely poor content, one step up from WP:Original research, and in essence a collection of raw data without the proper contextual information. Why we would ever want to take that approach, when we know how to create quality content on these kinds of topics by writing prose articles, is beyond me. It is, well, precisely what the essay WP:CARGO warns against. TompaDompa (talk) 17:11, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Side note: while I enjoy such articles and would like to see them preserved at TV Tropes in a systematic manner, I don't see how they are "one step up" from OR - they are pure OR, unreferenced stamp collecting :( Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:59, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The objections raised by notwithstanding, I was describing a sourced version, so not OR. Daranios (talk) 09:06, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * It's probably worth noting that sourced material can also constitute WP:Original research, for instance through WP:Improper editorial synthesis. Even with well-sourced material, if you use it out of context, or to reach or imply a conclusion not directly and explicitly supported by the source, you are engaging in original research, as our policy says. TompaDompa (talk) 09:13, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's a possible case/danger of OR, but again not really what was discussed above. Daranios (talk) 17:55, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * We're getting increasingly off-topic here, but suffice it to say that creating lists can be OR even when the entries themselves are sourced. It depends on how it's done. TompaDompa (talk) 18:26, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Merge to Tachyon - Remove the massive, poorly sourced example farm, which is the whole reason why this needed to be split out into a separate article in the first place, and what's left is a small section of sourced information that can be easily covered at the main article on Tachyons, and would actually be a more helpful way of presenting that information to readers due to the added context of the rest of the article explaining what the theoretical particle actually is. Rorshacma (talk) 21:08, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 *  Delete or merge per Rorschacma. Once you remove the poorly sourced list of examples, WP:NOPAGE is appropriate here. There isn't very much to say, but a very brief summary could appear as an WP:ATD. I would be fine with plain deletion. Shooterwalker (talk) 22:22, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment WP:NOPAGE is still appropriate here, per Zxcvbnm. As many editors have already noted, there isn't enough for a stand-alone article once you remove the unsourced material (which someone thankfully did). This is best covered at Tachyon. Shooterwalker (talk) 14:02, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't care too strongly about keep or merge and split out again when appropriate, but still would like to point out that we have a decent paragraph after only a fraction of the secondary sources listed at the article and popping up in the Google Books search have been used. So while providing added context of the rest of the article explaining what the theoretical particle actually is remains as an argument, the amount of content here is insufficient for a split only describes the current state, not the source material, and There isn't very much to say seem incorrect to me. Daranios (talk) 17:55, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the ping! Personally, I would still advocate for Merger, simply because of the WP:NOPAGE argument. I think it would greatly benefit readers' understanding of the topic if this information was presented as part of the same article that actually explains what tachyons are, and neither article is so long that length would be an issue. Rorshacma (talk) 18:07, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Withdrawing. The article I nominated was a very different beast from what we have now (effectively rewritten from scratch, mostly by TompaDompa). As such, I am withdrawing my nomination and ping everyone who voted so they can reconsider their votes (IMHO we can consider merger but it is not necessary and keeping in the current state is preferrable, and I'd prefer to retain the old history of the article as well).  --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  04:04, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I can't really take credit for most of the rewrite here—I removed the old unsourced material and located a few usable sources, but the new material was all added by (and some of it was then copyedited by me). TompaDompa (talk) 06:10, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep. Article is in much better shape now, but even at the time of nomination I would day that it was better than nothing and thus not a proper candidate for TNT.  Eluchil404 (talk) 07:22, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Merge to Tachyon. After cleanup, the amount of content here is insufficient for a split. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 12:59, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Merge with Tachyon: In its current state, I think what's listed here isn't enough to have a separate article and could be moved to the main article. StreetcarEnjoyer (talk)  17:39, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep, per WP:HEY. /Julle (talk) 00:01, 21 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Merge with Tachyon article improved per WP:HEY, but given its lightness, might be better served as a topic on  Tachyon
 * MiniMayor98 (talk) 14:43, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Merge Do we need a separate "in Fiction" article for a fictional particle? Ben Azura (talk) 21:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I'd say there is difference in nature between a scientific hypothesis and a piece of fiction like Unobtainium. Daranios (talk) 10:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Good point, I change my vote to Keep based on the cleanup work done during AfD and Piotrus withdrawing the nomination. Ben Azura (talk) 10:07, 23 March 2024 (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.