Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Technomancy (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 delete. It sure *seems* like this should have an article, but the discussion indicates that there is not SIGCOV in reliable sources about the topic. Those sources that have been presented have been meticulously debunked. I think I'd consider this an "anti-salt" delete, if and when enough sources are discovered upon which to build an NPOV article of sufficient length to be of encyclopedic value, we should welcome its recreation. As stands the article is a dictionary definition and belongs on a sister project. 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 03:40, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Technomancy
AfDs for this article:


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

Appears to be a non-notable neologism that fails WP:NEO. I tried to find a way to merge it into magic in fiction but couldn't even find sufficient sources for that. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 12:06, 23 November 2022 (UTC) Collecting more sources: A Worldbuilder's Guide to Magic, p. 57, has a good half-page with definition, examples and background on our primary defintion here. CBR. Gizmondo uses technomancy and techno-magic interchangeably for the example of Ravnica. Daranios (talk) 21:11, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements and Science fiction and fantasy.  ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 12:06, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Move to draft. The idea of magic interacting with technology is reasonably well-established, but this is clearly not in mainspace article shape. BD2412  T 16:43, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The idea might be established, but Wikipedia isn't TVTropes and not the place for indiscriminate original research. If the idea is not discussed in a detailed fashion then it's probably not fit to be anywhere on Wikipedia. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 00:18, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. This is important and makes a cool article. Ghost of Kiev  (talk) 17:23, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
 * See WP:ILIKEIT for why that isn't a valid argument in deletion discussions. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 00:11, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep a Google Scholar search shows it widely used in academic literature. There may well be ways to merge this with similar concepts, but outright deletion is almost certainly not warranted. I'll note that 2 of the 3 literary examples that immediately came to mind when reading the article title are covered appropriately in the article, although not with the depth I think is likely supported by RS'es. Jclemens (talk) 18:37, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
 * See WP:THEREMUSTBESOURCES. Without proof that it is widely discussed in reliable sources, a keep vote holds no weight really, and is outright speculation at best. Many things pop up in Google searches, much of it unusable on Wikipedia. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 00:16, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * See WP:BEFORE for why the failure to find and engage with these uses is your problem, not mine. That is, if you can't click on the scholar link above and see that my statement is accurate, that is your problem, not mine. Jclemens (talk) 03:57, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * @Jclemens Seriously, no, and you know better. Requirement to provide sources, per WP:V, is on editors who want to keep the article. Anyway, I did BEFORE and I claim there are next to no sources, this is a niche term with next to zero notability. Few uses are confused and don't define the concept, nor do they discuss it at any lenght. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:02, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * So what are you going to give me if I prove your statement wrong? If you can't click 'scholar' and see that there are plenty of uses of the word--which demonstrates that it is not a neologism--then we've got a problem here. The reason I didn't post a source analysis is that none is needed. The nomination does not argue that the word is non-notable, but that it's "a non-notable neologism that fails WP:NEO" and the bar for refuting that is far lower than proving the concept is actually notable. Allow me to quote, to save you a precious click: Articles on neologisms that have little or no usage in reliable sources are commonly deleted, as these articles are often created in an attempt to use Wikipedia to increase usage of the term. This has RS usage; it is not a neologism. Now, if you want to re-nominate this article on a different basis, please do so, but I do not see the value of doing any more work than necessary to prove that the nomination basis is incorrect. Jclemens (talk) 19:36, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Scholar shows there are few passing mentions, with no attempt to define the subject, and that these mentions occur in more than one context. It is  a neologism, with no universal definition. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:26, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
 * "You may have not found sources, but I did - I'm keeping them to myself!" if you think that sounds ridiculous, I'm just paraphrasing your response. Suffice it to say it is nonsensical. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 16:30, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * No, the fact that you can't see enough sources to eviscerate your nomination rationale (see my above response to Piotrus) is not a failure on my part, but one of yours to understand the rationale upon which you're advocating deletion: clicking Google Scholar and seeing all those isolated mentions is all I need, or you need, to see that your WP:NEO rationale is in error. Copying a bunch of them into the AfD debate 1) isn't my job per WP:BEFORE, and 2) wouldn't help anyways because the issue appears to be one of you expecting more from the sourcing than policy actually requires. Jclemens (talk) 19:36, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * As it states in WP:NEO, "Neologisms that are in wide use but for which there are no treatments in secondary sources are not yet ready for use and coverage in Wikipedia." This is what I meant in my rationale, which never attempted to claim that it was not widely used. However, it is not notable as a term either, a fact which has been confirmed by others. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 05:05, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. A well-established and well-covered concept in fantasy fiction and gaming. Certainly not any sort of neologism. Easily satisfies WP:GNG. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:39, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I will gladly withdraw my deletion nomination if I see WP:THREE reliable sources that discuss technomancy in significant detail. So far, none have been shown, just assertions that sources likely exist somewhere because people have heard of the word one day. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 17:00, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * You do know that WP:THREE is just an essay and has no standing on Wikipedia? WP:GNG is the standard we use. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. -- Necrothesp (talk) 17:14, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes it is "just an essay". Sometimes articles are contingent on a couple of sources, or even one source. However, these are usually very indepth and large. I do not see evidence of such, nor any source really. Just back and forth Wikilawyering about nonexistent sources that may exist somewhere. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 16:37, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * ,WP:NEO is part of WP:NOTDICT and not part of WP:N at all. Did you mean to raise a notability argument in the nomination? Jclemens (talk) 04:01, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * This is NOT an well-estabilished term. It's a super niche, super rare term. If you want to prove me wrong, cite your sources. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 11:59, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep While this article could use a lot of improvement, there are a number of sources which use and discuss the term, e.g., , and . The concepts appearing in those sources as "technomancy" are not identical, which is reflected in the differences between the sections of our article here. Daranios (talk) 20:25, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I am not seeing much to salvage here, nor SIGCOV of this topic; worse, your last source that has a few sentences about this seems to discuss not literary genre but some pseudoscience? BUT Encyclopedia of Fantasy has an entry on technofantasy, which seems to be the a related concept. In either case, I checked several encyclopedias of sf and such and neither of these terms is used (well, outside technofantasy in EoF). As such, I am afraid I have to lean delete due to failure to estabilish WP:GNG and significant WP:OR. The discussed term "technomancy" doesn't seem to be either discussed or even defined anywhere, and that's a major strike. Do let me know if I missed a source which defines it and discusses it? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  11:39, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Based on the the publisher and the the author, I had no reason to assume the third source to be pseudoscience. I don't claim to completely understand it, nor have I read the whole thing, but I still think this is a valid sociological examination of quasi-magical practices, and sees practitioners of technomancy as having some understanding of the world ("ability to read and represent the signs of time and nature"), but clad it in a magical guise appropriate to their time/culture. Daranios (talk) 21:14, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * @Daranios The point is, as TD noted below, is that the definition you found is about a different concept than the one discussed in the article. Maybe, just maybe, there is a notable concept of technomancy related to occult, but our article is about something else. As such, WP:TNT applies anyway. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 15:01, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Your first source says [...] beginning to blur the lines between technology as medium and techonology as magical tool. This theory of technomancy is a useful one to at least be aware of in your own occult research., the second source says we'll consider what would happen if God or his surrogate were all knowing but constrained to perform miracles by natural means. Borrowing from fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett, we'll call this kind of explanation "technomancy"., and the third source says Technomancy is a postmodern fusion of the art of schematisation and sympathetic picturisation (téchne) with the embodied craft of divination (manteía). A relevant technomancy of the world is fēng shui [...]). Those concepts are not just "not identical", they are fundamentally different concepts to the point of equivocation. Nor do they really correspond to the different sections in the article ("Theme", "Non-mystical technomancy", and "Non-scientific technology"). Those sources might make a case for a disambiguation page (if appropriate targets exist), but they don't make a case for keeping this article as it is currently constructed. The current state of the article is an WP:OR mess. What would you keep? TompaDompa (talk) 12:46, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Exactly. Three authors cited use the term in three differnet ways. It's a mess, clearly, nobody knows what this term is suppoed to mean, people use it as synonym for various other stuff. Only the third source tries to define it, and well, it treats it as a synonym of feng shui. Seriously, this is a mess. I can't even seriously suggest we make it into a disambig, as the cited uses are inconsistent and based on a single source. Note I've created an entry on technofantasy now, but it is not the same concept as the one discussed here, or in the sources cited. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:30, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree that the term is used in different ways. I did not mean to say the three sources I picked as examples correspond to the three sections of our article, but rather that the article recognized that the term has been used differently. So if I come to Wikipedia to learn what the term means, I'd like to see an article that does explain the different variations out there. If this could be done by a disambiguation page, that would be fine with me, but I doubt that there are appropriate target pages - Non-scientific technology would correspond to Magitech, though. I did not have the time to thoroughly go through the numerous sources available (that's why it would be so helpful to learn what the nominator found out on individual sources in the required WP:BEFORE search before getting to their overall conclusion). uses the term in the sense of Clarke's third law, so I would keep the paragraph surrounding that, with the sourced Technomages from Babylon 5 as a good example. Terry Pratchett: Titan of Technomancy confirms that the Non-scientific technology is one important part of what the author describes as Pratchett's technomancy. (Unfortunately I don't have access to p. 230.) The Shadowrun example should be double-checked and corrected or expanded with regard to the short definition in this secondary source, chapter 25.3. that the characteristicon of a technomancer is their "embodied magical ability to manipulate the ghost in the machine". Daranios (talk) 21:34, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Just so we understand each other, what would you say this article is about: the word "technomancy" (i.e. WP:WORDISSUBJECT) or the concept of technomancy? TompaDompa (talk) 22:42, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Not sure. What I'd expect from a cleaned page was to explain that technomancy has been used to describe a, b, c, give the word origin, background on the concepts where available, examples where appropriate. Maybe not unlike the Minority article before it became a disambig page. Which would you say that is? Daranios (talk) 20:52, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Okay, but surely you understand that's a major problem? The way to write an article about the word and an article about the concept are completely different. The sources that are necessary to write an article about the word and an article about the concept are completely different. How can you even tell if a source is relevant if you don't know if the article is (supposed to be) about the word or the concept? In order to write an article about the word, you need sources that discuss the word and how it's been used in different ways—not just sources that use it in different ways. In order to write an article about the concept, you need sources that discuss the concept—and they need to be discussing the same concept rather than different ones that happen to be described using the same word. What you're suggesting goes against WP:NOTDICT (In Wikipedia, things are grouped into articles based on what they are, not what they are called by.) and WP:BROADCONCEPT—because it would be like writing an article about Mercury (element), Mercury (planet), Mercury (automobile), and Mercury (mythology) all in the same article. It should perhaps give you pause that the version of Minority you linked to is from 2006.For the record, the Technomancy article is (ostensibly) about the (or perhaps more accurately a) concept—the WP:LEAD says In science fiction and fantasy, technomancy, also called technomagic, is a category of magical abilities that affect technology or magical powers that are gained through the use of technology. Other senses of the word "technomancy" are consequently out of scope, and sources using the word to mean something else are off-topic. TompaDompa (talk) 23:34, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * @TompaDompa Just a side note that you may want to actually vote... so far the votes are pretty unanimous and my reading of your comments is that you may not lean the same way as they do. But this discussion may be closed soon if all the closer sees are several bold keeps. NOTAVOTE, yes, but... Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 15:03, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I had chosen the example of the old version of Minority to show that such a topic can grow from an imperfect article to a proper disambiguation page when enough material has been collected, as Wikipedia as a whole has grown. (Obviously Minority is a way more relevant concept than Technomancy, so no surprise in that issue having been solved long ago there but not yet here.) I am somewhat disappointed that the policies should forbid the kind of article I had described. Anyways, staying concept for the time being, if you are not offended by the current "or" in the lead, and are a bit generous, I think this (in contrast to the Mercury example) can still qualify as a "sometimes-amorphous relationship between a wide range of related concepts" of WP:BROADCONCEPT under the following umbrella: Technomancy, also called technomagic, is a category of abilities to affect technology through magical or beyond-mundane means or magical powers that are gained through the use of technology. This fits the colloquial use of "surprising ability with technology", the Shadowrun example, the Clarke's third law examples, and (as far as I understand it) Tzanelli's defition, where understanding of nature is used to produce results in the guise of magic. If time permits I'll look for more soures to support the individual concepts below this broad one another time. Daranios (talk) 16:22, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The problem with that is that that definition is original to you, synthesized from disparate uses of of a term. You're engaging in WP:ANALYSIS, or in other words WP:Original research. Surely you understand that? TompaDompa (talk) 19:15, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The former does not speak of technomancy but technomagic, and CBR is a really low-quality source for this type of material. I think it's pretty clear that this does not rise to the level of coverage required by WP:GNG. Recall WP:WHYN: We require "significant coverage" in reliable sources so that we can actually write a whole article, rather than half a paragraph or a definition of that topic. That being said, I have done you the courtesy of removing the unsourced and irrelevant material and adding a single-sentence WP:Dictionary definition based on the CBR source. If you think you can expand it to a full article based on the sources, feel free to do so. Otherwise, it might be a better idea to figure out some other article where this can be mentioned in a sentence or two (there does not seem to exist any list of types of magic, or else we could perhaps have redirected there). TompaDompa (talk) 16:55, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The article is explicitely on technomancy and technomagic as synonyms. Oh, well, it was a moment ago. You will see that the definitions of the two sources match. I will continue to look for sources. As a preliminary opinion, if there were only those two, it would be fine in my view to merge that to, for lack of a better target, Magic in fiction. Then this should become a disambiguation page linking to that, Magitech, Technomancy, Clarke's third law, and probably Technomagic, to account for the various ways the term(s) have been used. Daranios (talk) 20:58, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * And here it is: Tales of superhuman powers, p. 124, has another half page. It uses the broader definition which next to affecting technology supernaturally also includes "creating advanced technology" and "marvelous inventions". Daranios (talk) 21:24, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Where did the idea that "technomancy" and "technomagic" are synonyms come from, exactly? Certainly not from the sources. These are, as said above, extremely niche terms. I still don't see the coverage being sufficient for more than a basic WP:Dictionary definition, and in order to even write that we have to ignore the sources that define the word in a different way that does not conform to our preconceived notions of what it should mean. There's nothing to merge here. The Wiktionary entry is to my eye enough, which is no obstacle to deletion. The rest of the stuff you're proposing as part of a disambiguation page is on very shaky grounds, methinks. TompaDompa (talk) 21:49, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I did not mean to "ignore the sources that define the word in a different way", but initally thought the variants should all be treated here, but I understood you told me we should focus on the separate concepts separately. Was I wrong? Based on the old lead, the editors knew or percieved that the two terms "technomancy" and "technomagic" are synonyms, so technomagic should certainly have been part of the WP:BEFORE search. You have suggested we should not focus on the word but the concept, right? I have concentrated my later search on the concept described in the old lead. I did not find a secondary source for this concept which spells out the two words being synonyms. But we have three source which use two different words and define the concept in different depths. Do you see those as describing different concepts? Do you think the definition used in the technomagic source does not conform to the old lead or your succint new lead? If so, how could we distinguish them properly, so that a hypothetical technomagic article would not be a WP:CONTENTFORK of our topic here? Otherwise I think all secondary sources on a topic should be counted towards notability. Daranios (talk) 11:51, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Ah, yeah, and -mancy tells us that -magic and -mancy are synonyms in the field of fantasy. Daranios (talk) 15:45, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The point I was trying to make by saying that in order to even write that we have to ignore the sources that define the word in a different way that does not conform to our preconceived notions of what it should mean was that if this had been an established term, we wouldn't have to go through so many "false positives" (for lack of a better term) to get the sources that use the term in the way we want them to. I realize that I probably could have been clearer on that. The old WP:LEAD was engaging in WP:Original research, which is really all there is to it. I have concentrated my later search on the concept described in the old lead.—that's the problem. When your starting point is original research, that's also where you end up. That you did not find a secondary source for this concept which spells out the two words being synonyms should probably tell you something about the viability of what you're doing. TompaDompa (talk) 16:34, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Just noting that I still agree with TD, also, another meaning: https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Technomancer - that's another variant. If we allowed OR, that would be worth discussing. Sadly, we don't. Arguably, there is probably a RS sufficient to mention this term appears in the Shadowrun universe, just like another can be found for B5 (and I'll also throw in GURPS Technomancer), but again, we need RS for examples. All we have at the end are a bunch of definitions in various context. The source that was found is arguably the best for the current context (in fiction), but one source is a bit below WP:GNG treshold. Still, it's something, and I'd constructively suggest to think if there is a merge/redirect target for the current one-sentence, single-reference definition. Perhaps the solution is to create the technology in science fiction article, based on . Then we could merge and redirect that definition, even expand it from the source with examples cited. PS. Instead of a redirect, we also need to consider whether a disambig is not needed instead, given the occult uses? Bu a disambig to where, assuming one place would be the "tech in sf" article? Any thoughs what might be the occult target? Technopaganism, perhaps? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  02:26, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't think the Shadowrun example has another meanining, but rather fits quite well into the concept as defined in Tales of superhuman powers. Don't you think so? Daranios (talk) 11:51, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
 * @Daranios It does, the problem is that saying so in the article may be ORish. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:37, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I disagree because WP:SKYISBLUE and such, but we don't need to quibble about that, as A Worldbuilder's Guide to Magic tells us that GURPS' Technomancer followed by Shadowrun falls into the category of technomagic (which is another indication that the two terms are used interchangeably). Daranios (talk) 15:45, 30 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete. Per my extensive rationale in comments above (TL;DR: this topic is not notable, sources found seem to be about a different meaning anyway, if not meanings, plural, neither of whic appears notable either). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 15:04, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete My initial plan was to rewrite this article (because the current version is an WP:OR mess without proper sourcing) based on the sources found by and, as I have done previously during deletion discussions such as Articles for deletion/Time viewer. However, after actually looking at the sources it became apparent that they are not about the topic of this article (magical abilities that affect technology or magical powers that are gained through the use of technology in fiction), but rather use the term "technomancy" to mean something completely different (and the sources use it in completely different ways from each other, too). Like , I searched sources that I know to be useful for writing articles like this (e.g. science fiction encyclopaedias such as The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy) for this term without any success. The term "technomancy" (and for that matter "technomagic") does not appear in Brave New Words:  The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction  or the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. That tells me that this is not, contrary to assertions above, an established term in this sense. If anybody happens to find any sources that actually provide WP:Significant coverage of this topic, ping me and I'll reconsider. If the sources are sufficient for it, I'll rewrite the article myself. TompaDompa (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete. After removing all the uncited content, we're left with a dicdef. Stifle (talk) 11:10, 1 December 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.