Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Time's Arrow (Star Trek: The Next Generation)


 * 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. postdlf (talk) 23:06, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Time's Arrow (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

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Also, for similar reasons:



Redirect to Star Trek: The Next Generation (season 5) (or other appropriate season-specific article). Article(s) tagged for being little more than a plot summary since 2008 (or tagged for other issues, long-term in all cases). Later tagged for notability, but editors are refusing to let the notability tag remain in place while failing to provide sources that would satisfy notability concerns. Even if every other episode of Star Trek had its own article, WP:OTHERSTUFF would still be applicable to this case. DonIago (talk) 12:35, 13 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment: FWIW, I'm hoping it won't come to actual deletion for these, but I felt the matter was forced when editors refused to let notability tags remain in place, which IMO caused no harm to the articles and may have ultimately led to improvement. I didn't seem to have any option other than forcing the issue here unless I wanted to edit-war. DonIago (talk) 12:49, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep in all the above listed cases. Leave tags for future improvement.  Episodes of iconic American television series deserve their individual entries.  Sir Rhosis (talk) 01:14, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd be fine with that option, as long as it's made clear to the editors who kept removing the tags that they are in fact appropriate until such time as notability has been clearly established. DonIago (talk) 12:58, 14 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep and re-tag Yes the sources are out there, but it needs to be clear on the individual articles that improvement still needs to be done. This isn't just limited to these episode articles but across the whole raft of them. As always, we're making progress, but it's slow going - but now roughly one in eight episode articles are fully cited but it's slow going as there are only a handful of editors working on these. But there are numerous sources (Star Trek being one of the most heavily covered series for production information). Anyway, I'm waffling - keep and re-tag sums it up really. Miyagawa (talk) 10:40, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

I've created sections below for discussion revolving around a particular one of the episodes covered under this AFD. Probably should have done that earlier; sorry for the oversight. DonIago (talk) 14:52, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Time's Arrow

 * Comment, as much as it pains me, as little more than a plot summary this really doesn't belong here. I've tried looking up to see what real world impact it had, but drew a blank; it's not one of the "classic" TNG episodes and nor is it bad enough that any non-fan source seems to have written much about it.  Hoping that someone can add some real-world sources and impact to the article to save it.  Lankiveil (speak to me) 12:42, 13 July 2015 (UTC).


 * Keep all The Time's Arrow episode is notable, being documented in detail in sources such as Exploring Science Through Science Fiction; The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion; Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative; Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future; The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy; Star Trek 101: A Practical Guide to Who, What, Where, and Why. The episode seems especially notable compared to others because it was a double episode split across the end-season cliff-hanger and involving time-travel loops.  In any case, it seems that the topic has just been nominated because of some petty dispute about a tag which is insufficient reason to delete this or the other pages.  It is clear that Star Trek episode are, in general, something that we will cover and the rest is then a matter of ordinary editing not deletion per WP:NOTCLEANUP. Andrew D. (talk) 17:02, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

The Tholian Web

 * Keep -- the article on the Tholian Web should definitely be kept.
 * Nominator also seems to have skipped performing a Scholar search on "Tholian Web". In a 1994 article in Psychological Perspectives Alexandra Wolf described a phone call, that left her feeling trapped, so trapped she wrote: "With that phone call two years ago, I began to feel like Star Trek's Captain Kirk in ”The Tholian Web,” drifting, transparent, helplessly vanish..."  The article itself is behind a paywall, but that passage was picked by google's search engine.  I suggest an episode so iconic that scholars assume it will be meaningful to readers interested in other topics, helps establish its notability.
 * Political Scientist, Chad Miller entitled his 2006 PhD thesis after the Tholian Web episode. He devotes the first page and half of his thesis to explaining why he chose the metaphor of being trapped in a fractured space-time continuum as the title for a thesis on public administration.  "...It also raises the question of whether the network governance of regional economic development is a Tholian web that might trap and crush public administration."
 * Gerry Beyer cited the episode as illustrating an early instance of a video-will, in a 2010 article on video-wills for a law journal.
 * A newspaper search for "Tholian Web" shows that the Star Trek episode was notable enough that the US Customs named an operation after it that resulted in "hundreds of prosecutions". Let me preclude counter-arguments that I am ignoring WP:NOTINHERITED.  Those arguments would be backward.  The USA has hundreds, or thousands, of bridges, parks, schools, avenues, named after Martin Luther King Jr..  Some of those bridges, schools, etc., are notable.  If someone unfamiliar with Reverend King argued that being a namesake did not make King notable due to NOTINHERITED, they would have NOTINHERITED backward.  Parks and other fixtures, where someone argues Reverend King had a personal connection, like a school he attended, a street he lived on, a bridge he lead a march across, would inherit some notability from King, due to the citable connection between them.  But all the Parks and other fixtures would add to King's notability.  Similarly, that customs agents remembered the unique hook from this episode, saw a connection with their entrapment exercise, and chose "Tholian Web" as its title, helps establish the notability of this particular episode
 * Where would readers of any of the articles I cited above first turn to, to read about the episode, if they weren't familiar with it? They would first turn to the wikipedia -- unless this frankly poorly thought out nomination were to succeed.  Successful deletion would be a grave disservice to our readers.
 * WRT the other episodes, I am not familiar with them, but I suspect that they too would be iconic enough that we would find lots of scholarly and cultural references to them. Geo Swan (talk) 04:30, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I might assume that we would find lots of references as well, but the fact that the articles have existed for years and no such references have yet been provided suggests otherwise. I think everyone participating in this discussion would agree that the easiest way to moot this discussion would be to improve the articles with such references, and many if not all of the participants would also consider that the best case scenario. DonIago (talk) 12:56, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * The articles have existed for years, in a less than ideal state. But they aren't biographies of living people.  For various reasons, including protecting us from being sued, we require BLPs to measure up to a higher standard of referencing.  I suggest that years of existence strongly erodes how much weight we should place on your personal frustration with the contributors who erased the notability tags on these articles.  Sorry, but in retrospect, do you really think you did an adequate job of explaining your concerns?  Please review Talk:Time's Arrow (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Talk:The Tholian Web and Talk:Cause and Effect (Star Trek: The Next Generation).  It is only in Talk:Cause and Effect (Star Trek: The Next Generation) that you attempted to explain your concern over notability.  You didn't initiate Talk:Cause and Effect (Star Trek: The Next Generation), someone else did.  Looking at that discussion it looks like you just bailed out.  Your good faith correspondent wasn't ignoring you, but it seems to me you just stopped trying to explain yourself.  I hadn't looked at Notability (fiction) recently.  On the one hand, buried in it, it says "...particularly Wikipedia is not simply plot summaries."  But the most important thing is that it is an essay, not an official wikidocument.  I think this makes it understandable that the contributors who you didn't convince over to your favored interpretation of what an article should and shouldn't contain, don't see themselves as policy violators.  The wikipedia is supposed to be a collaborative, collegial project.  In this particular case, you were the one with the concern, so I think it should have fallen to you to explain to your correspondents why an article had to be more than a plot summary.  At several point in this discussion you wrote that you couldn't imagine what else you could have done.  Well, beyond making a greater effort to explain your position, why not look to see what WP:Fiction recommends?  It recommends WP:Dispute resolution when discussion between the original parties doesn't work.  Not deletion, dispute resolution.  Geo Swan (talk) 23:06, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * While I appreciate your perspectives and will take them into consideration going forward (you have my word on that), the fact remains that we are here now. I'm willing to accept that I may have jumped the gun, but I think RBB in particular similarly failed to address this situation as well as they might have; I might hope that this escalation will encourage them to reconsider their approach going forward as well. In particular it's been my understanding that maintenance tags generally shouldn't be removed without addressing the situation they refer to unless there is a clear consensus to do so; I don't believe such a consensus was ever established, and I believe it should have been incumbent on them to make the effort to establish one. Again, maintenance tags do no harm to articles; the whole point of them is to call out potential problems and hopefully lead to improvement.
 * In any case, I'd be happy to withdraw the remaining two nominations if either 1) the articles are updated to address notability concerns, or 2) the notability tags are reinstated and it is made clear that they are appropriate. I'm open to other options as well, but I'm not going to support simply keeping the articles with no notability tagging, as I believe these articles do need to either be bulked up with sources that establish that the specific episodes were notable or redirected. And frankly I see no harm in having them redirected (the material would still be there, merely suppressed) until such time as information could be added that would address notability concerns, if it comes to that. DonIago (talk) 13:38, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I might assume that we would find lots of references as well, but the fact that the articles have existed for years and no such references have yet been provided suggests otherwise. I think everyone participating in this discussion would agree that the easiest way to moot this discussion would be to improve the articles with such references, and many if not all of the participants would also consider that the best case scenario. DonIago (talk) 12:56, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * The articles have existed for years, in a less than ideal state. But they aren't biographies of living people.  For various reasons, including protecting us from being sued, we require BLPs to measure up to a higher standard of referencing.  I suggest that years of existence strongly erodes how much weight we should place on your personal frustration with the contributors who erased the notability tags on these articles.  Sorry, but in retrospect, do you really think you did an adequate job of explaining your concerns?  Please review Talk:Time's Arrow (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Talk:The Tholian Web and Talk:Cause and Effect (Star Trek: The Next Generation).  It is only in Talk:Cause and Effect (Star Trek: The Next Generation) that you attempted to explain your concern over notability.  You didn't initiate Talk:Cause and Effect (Star Trek: The Next Generation), someone else did.  Looking at that discussion it looks like you just bailed out.  Your good faith correspondent wasn't ignoring you, but it seems to me you just stopped trying to explain yourself.  I hadn't looked at Notability (fiction) recently.  On the one hand, buried in it, it says "...particularly Wikipedia is not simply plot summaries."  But the most important thing is that it is an essay, not an official wikidocument.  I think this makes it understandable that the contributors who you didn't convince over to your favored interpretation of what an article should and shouldn't contain, don't see themselves as policy violators.  The wikipedia is supposed to be a collaborative, collegial project.  In this particular case, you were the one with the concern, so I think it should have fallen to you to explain to your correspondents why an article had to be more than a plot summary.  At several point in this discussion you wrote that you couldn't imagine what else you could have done.  Well, beyond making a greater effort to explain your position, why not look to see what WP:Fiction recommends?  It recommends WP:Dispute resolution when discussion between the original parties doesn't work.  Not deletion, dispute resolution.  Geo Swan (talk) 23:06, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * While I appreciate your perspectives and will take them into consideration going forward (you have my word on that), the fact remains that we are here now. I'm willing to accept that I may have jumped the gun, but I think RBB in particular similarly failed to address this situation as well as they might have; I might hope that this escalation will encourage them to reconsider their approach going forward as well. In particular it's been my understanding that maintenance tags generally shouldn't be removed without addressing the situation they refer to unless there is a clear consensus to do so; I don't believe such a consensus was ever established, and I believe it should have been incumbent on them to make the effort to establish one. Again, maintenance tags do no harm to articles; the whole point of them is to call out potential problems and hopefully lead to improvement.
 * In any case, I'd be happy to withdraw the remaining two nominations if either 1) the articles are updated to address notability concerns, or 2) the notability tags are reinstated and it is made clear that they are appropriate. I'm open to other options as well, but I'm not going to support simply keeping the articles with no notability tagging, as I believe these articles do need to either be bulked up with sources that establish that the specific episodes were notable or redirected. And frankly I see no harm in having them redirected (the material would still be there, merely suppressed) until such time as information could be added that would address notability concerns, if it comes to that. DonIago (talk) 13:38, 15 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. The article has been improved to the point where I no longer feel notability is a concern. DonIago (talk) 14:52, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) Thanks for withdrawing your nomination of Tholian Web.
 * We used to recognize, back in the golden age of wikipedia article building, that AFD should be reserved for articles on topics that weren't notable. We used to recognize that articles should generally be retained, even when their current state sucked, when they were about notable topics.
 * Exceptions were made when an article, and all its previous revisions, were entirely copyright violations. Additionally, when a topic was notable, but highly charged, and the article had a long history of failures of good faith efforts to improve it, to reach a consensus as to what it should say, deletion was sometimes used as a last resort.
 * So, I asked myself, do these three article show a long history of failures of good faith efforts to reach a consensus, sufficiently serious to justify deletion? The answer is an unequivocal no.
 * Talk:The Tholian Web is brief, and shows no such record. Sadly, turning to reading the edit summaries recorded in the article's revision history...  First, no one should have to look at the edit summaries to see there had been a dispute.  I see there was one, a minor one, where you made two reversions, explaining your reversions solely in your edit summaries Reverted edits by RBBrittain (talk) to last version by 109.153.179.63 notability of this episode has not been addressed" and Reverted edits by RBBrittain (talk) to last version by Doniago don't remove maintenance tags without discussion or fixing.  In my experience the most common trigger for edit warring is the mis-use of edit summaries as the sole explanation for complicated or controversial edits.  The easiest way for the primitive hind-brains of our fellow contributors to respond to a controversial edit, poorly explained solely in a brief edit summary, is with their own inadequate provocative edit summary.  Both you and  should have taken the time to explain why you engaged in a reversion exchange, on the talk page.
 * Similarly, Talk:Time's Arrow (Star Trek: The Next Generation) shows no sign of serious, potentially AFD triggering content or editorial disputes. The record shows you did voice two mild concerns, in 2011!  They are stale.  Anyone reading the talk page would assume that, since you didn't repeat them, they were addressed, back in 2011.
 * Finally, in Talk:Cause and Effect (Star Trek: The Next Generation) we see a discussion over your concern over the article's notability, initiated by . That was a good thing.  On July 3rd Chaheel Riens gave you a mild warning on edit warring.  You responded, then he or she responded with a compromise, which you apparently accepted with good grace, writing "I'm okay with that; I just hope it will lead to some tangible improvement of the article. Thank you. "  What the heck!  You accepted a compromise on July 3rd, and then nevertheless nominate the article for deletion on July 13th?  Geo Swan (talk) 16:17, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I reconsidered my position after RBBrittain left me this comment on July 11. As I've said, I would have been happy to simply leave the articles tagged for Notability concerns, but the other editors would neither accept that nor indicate that they intended to do anything to address said concerns. If there was a better way of handling this then I'm open to such in the future, but RBB specifically suggested AFD as an appropriate option, and it seems clear that additional eyes were needed on this situation. DonIago (talk) 16:26, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I saw RBB left the suggestion that you consider escalating directly to an AFD. I think they were mistaken to advise you to skip the remaining intermediate steps, like calling for attention from previously uninvolved third parties.  Geo Swan (talk) 21:12, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * You're welcome to tell them so; I was left with the distinct impression that they were disinclined to listen to anything I might have to say on the matter. DonIago (talk) 13:38, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Cause and Effect

 * Keep. I believe the information that has been added to this article satisfies notability concerns. DonIago (talk) 13:41, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:47, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Television-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:47, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science fiction-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:47, 14 July 2015 (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.