Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Victorian letter writing guides


 * 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. B music  ian  15:13, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Victorian letter writing guides

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This article purports to be about Victorian Letter Writing Guides however it functions almost entirely as both a how-to guide (in violation of the WP:NOT policy) and a description of a particular historical style of letter writing already covered in the Love Letter page. No letter writing guides are mentioned by name in the body of the article and it therefore functions as a description of common writing practices, not an encyclopedic entry on "letter writing guides". At the very least this article should be re-written as a historical article on Victorian Letter Writing Etiquette or Merged as such into Love Letter. The main content and perspective of this article is disposable though as 1. it is not about its eponymous subject, 2. its named subject is not particularly notable (a general Google search of "victorian letter writing guides" brings up only 8500 hits, many of them mirrors of the wiki text) and 3. the spirit of the article is already articulated in the previously mentioned Love Letter page. Pakiderm (talk) 19:24, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep. Disagree that article is written like a guide. It exclusively uses past tense to refer to advice having been given by the guides which are the subject of the article. Furthermore, even if it were written like a guide, the article should be rewritten rather than deleted, as there are plenty of sources for the subject matter. Pirsq (talk) 22:15, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep unless a suitable merger target can be found. I agree that the subject was very notable and plenty of sources exist. But it does require a great deal of work. Most obviously, most correspondence was not in the form of love letters or matters of the heart. Style and form were of great importance in all correspondence, whether in the conduct of business affairs, ordinary social intercourse, or anything else, and hence the market for guides and other instruction. A decision needs to be made whether this article should be about the guides themselves, or the etiquette of letter writing as demonstrated in these guides. And then there are questions as to whether these varied with place and time (the Victorian period was a long one) and so forth. --AJHingston (talk) 00:45, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Speedy Keep The nomination is proposing a variety of possibilities such as rewriting or merger and so, per WP:BEFORE, a deletion discussion is premature. See Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing for an example of a source which contains detailed content about letter writing manuals. Warden (talk) 20:16, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep per included references and presumed common name for this type of article. Topic appears to meet WP:GNG. Suggestion to merge to Love Letter not valid, as those have been and always will be written - whereas this article is of a historical nature. Nom now blocked due to username, although name could obviously be a good-faith coincidence. -- Trevj (talk) 13:59, 6 March 2012 (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.