Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/World's shortest book


 * 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. Looks like my proposal for Socialism in 21st century Britain by Jacob Rees Mogg will have to go elsewhere. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont)  11:45, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

World's shortest book

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A type of joke. Fails WP:GNG. The first cited source, Harris, consists of a passing mention, a parenthetical observation: "(One of the late sixties joke templates was title-of-the-world's shortest-book, like Theories of Racial Harmony, by George Wallace, and Problems of the Obese, by Twiggy, and a prime candidate for this title circulating linguistics at the time was The Bawdy Humor of Noam Chomsky.)" I don't even know what the second reference is supposed to be, and in any case it is about a different topic, the empty book. Search results for this phrase seem to consist mostly of people making this joke, not discussing it.

proposed to merge this article into Empty book, but on reflection I disagree. Empty book is about books with blank pages that have been published as a joke, whereas this is only about a vaguely similar kind of joke, minus the actual book. Perhaps there is some list of jokes this could redirect to? Otherwise I recommend deletion. The joke is not even funny.  Sandstein  19:09, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions.   Sandstein   19:09, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Merge to Empty book: They are essentially the same thing, or close enough that it doesn't make sense to have two distinct articles. Whether the joke is funny or not is irrelevant, and it is just another way of describing empty books for a more specific purpose. Find citations for the books, i guess. Theleekycauldron (talk) 20:16, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , they are not the same thing, and merging them would be WP:OR because we have no sources making the connection. This article is about the jokes people tell each other of the form: "What's the world's shortest book? It's 'What A knows about B'." Empty book is about actual physical books with empty pages that people publish with titles like "What X knows about Y". These books are not short, but empty. The general kind of (stupid) joke is the same, but one is just a joke, the other is a physical book. Also, I would't know what to merge except perhaps the one sentence from Harris, which would be plagiarism.  Sandstein   22:48, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You're not wrong, but I don't think it's true that the book titles aren't worth preserving. Theleekycauldron (talk) 23:00, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Empty books at least exist. In the truly odd case of Fifty Shades of Gray it ran 50 blank pages in 50 shades. Here most of these things never existed beyond someone saying it once, somewhere. It is a much more ephemeral and meansingless concept.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:37, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete A stub article about a template? Not even sure what it is. Oaktree b (talk) 21:11, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete While this article clearly shows that being an "Amazon best seller" is not in any way a sign of notability, this is not really worth having an article on, especially since it is not well sourced, and some of the information in her borders on the insulting, at times to whole ethnic groups, there is no good reason to have it.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:34, 28 January 2021 (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.