[WikiEN-l] Notability and Fictional Subjects

[Philip Sandifer]

It occurs to me that, in several years of fighting for a more  
inclusionist stance on fictional topics, I've never been thoroughly  
explicit about why I care.

I am a PhD student in English focusing on popular culture. I have  
written and taught on comics, video games, television, films, and all  
manner of obscurities. I am, in this area, not just an editor of  
Wikipedia. I am a serious user of it. I routinely use Wikipedia to  
look up and check basic facts about fictional subjects - what episodes  
a minor character appeared in, who the creator of an obscure 70s DC  
comics villain was, what the plot of a random episode of something is.  
I use Wikipedia for background information to decide if something is  
worth looking into in more detail. I don't cite it, or use it in place  
of the primary source for close readings. But if I need a quick throw- 
away fact or to know if looking into something is going to be worth my  
time, Wikipedia is useful.

When an area that has been thoroughly worked on has not been decimated  
by deletion and notability police, it is an invaluable resource that  
often has not been duplicated elsewhere. There is no other place on  
the Internet where I can go for some of this information. When  
articles are deleted, the information and work that went into them are  
gone, and I cannot get at them. For a handful of shows with active  
Wikia projects the information gets mirrored elsewhere, but for a  
large amount of stuff, deleted is gone.

Plot summaries, cast lists, biographies of fictional people, etc -  
these things are not "fancruft." They are information that I use for  
serious scholarly research. Regularly and routinely. When they are  
deleted, my work becomes harder. When they are present, I can save  
hours of searching for minor details.

I am all for adding more in-universe material, and cutting summaries  
and the like to manageable lengths. I do not advocate scene by scene  
or chapter by chapter analyses. But on the other hand, it's  
tremendously useful to be able to get a general plot of a television  
series from the first episode up to the present. Useful. To real  
research.

When the information is easily verifiable (as in-universe information  
almost always is), the purpose of a notability guideline is to  
restrict Wikipedia to useful information. The "multiple independent  
sources" rule has, in the past, been a somewhat effective way of  
handling this. But we must not forget that the point of a notability  
guideline is to make sure that Wikipedia is limited to only useful and  
important subjects.

Plot summaries, episode descriptions, minor characters, etc are  
useful. They are important. To real, peer-reviewed research. We are  
not talking here about webcomics that end after three weeks, or about  
obscure garage bands. In most of these cases we are talking about  
television shows with audiences in the millions. People study these  
things. They are legitimate objects of academic research. And  
Wikipedia's coverage of them helps. It is an area where Wikipedia  
directly serves the public good.

Please stop deleting this stuff. Thanks.

-Phil Sandifer