Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Villain of the week


 * 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. Sam Walton (talk) 00:36, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

Villain of the week

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A trope in episodic fiction. Marked as unsourced since 2007, and essentially unchanged since then. Google provides no obviously suitable sources, though there may well be some academic work that could be used to support this article. But *in the absence of sourcing: Tropes can be notable, but the fact that nobody has found or added reliable sources or expanded this one-paragraph article for six years indicates that this is the sort of content that TV Tropes is better at covering. Might have a place in a future article about episodic fiction, but that currently redirects to Serial (literature). Alphabet salad that supports deletion in the current form: WP:V, WP:GNG, WP:NOR.  Sandstein  18:08, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. NorthAmerica1000 10:36, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Television-related deletion discussions. NorthAmerica1000 10:36, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science fiction-related deletion discussions. NorthAmerica1000 10:38, 5 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Information I did a quck newspapers.com-search for this frase: The top results:, , . (t) Josve05a  (c) 17:51, 5 November 2014 (UTC)


 * It doesn't matter if google provides no sources for this term. The paragraph describes what this phrase means just fine. It is valuable information and should not be deleted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:1:A680:807:A8D2:FBEA:458A:E1D8 (talk) 14:14, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment: I'm sympathetic to both the lack of significant coverage in sources and to the prevalence of the term for descirbing characters and a format. Google searches also show that the phrase is used for a number of other situations, as User:Josve05a's links show. The term should likely be included on Wiktionary, but without reliable sources covering the concept in detail, it doesn't appear to meet notability. Note that TV Tropes claims that the term was coined in 1963 by the writing staff of The Outer Limits, perhaps implying that their exists older sources that discuss the term (though the Wikipedia article only refers to "the bear"). —Ost (talk) 15:27, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Natg 19 (talk) 00:31, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

 
 * Keep there is pretty significant usage of the comment in cultural studies work on Google Scholar (see the results) moreover significant number of Google Books results talk about this format (see for example this discussion of Smallville or the other results). I would imagine that with enough deep diving would begin to find Encyclopedic-level discussions of this format. This represents a similar set of problems to what I encountered when working on Novelist, debut novel or the historical fiction vs. historical novel conversations and I would imagine anyone with enough drive and familiarity with Television studies would be able to pull together a pretty good article, Sadads (talk) 18:45, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment: As the article currently stands, it is a clear deletion case. However, the concept itself does appear to be notable enough for inclusion, either as an improved stand-alone article or merged onto another page. If we have some sort of "TV Tropes" type article on Wikipedia, I'd support a move to there. QueenCake (talk) 00:39, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep I would say that the quality of the article does not argue for deletion - it doesn't need a complete rewrite, but is instead of the "here is the basis for future expansion" that many stub-class articles are. In addition to the sources mentioned above, replacing "villain" with "monster" when doing the searches reveals a great many sources that only use the latter term. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 23:11, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep on the basis of Sada's argument above: this is a term used in the critical literature.  DGG ( talk ) 22:52, 20 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Rcsprinter123    (yarn)  @ 15:22, 22 November 2014 (UTC)


 * The "keep" opinions above are unconvincing. They point to various searches that indicate that the term is being used (which I readily concede), but nobody has been able to provide a definition, let alone anything approaching substantial coverage, in published reliable sources. The most that can be gleaned from these links (of unclear reliability) is that this is used to refer to a format of episodic fiction where the protagonists fight a new opponent each episode. This is close to a mere dictionary definition and is not enough to support an article. If nobody is able to add references to any reliable sources to the article, it fails WP:V and must be deleted.  Sandstein   19:57, 22 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep The current page is too narrow in scope but there seems to be lots of scope of expansion as more general topic titles such as episodic fiction and television episode are redirects which don't currently lead to good coverage of such formulaic structures. See Story Structure Architect for an example of a reasonable high level source. Andrew D. (talk) 13:15, 23 November 2014 (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.