Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Lame Duck Congress

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 no consensus. There is no strong agreement on what should happen with this article, and there is certainly no consensus that it should be outright deleted. I think the best way forward would be to either start a merge discussion on the talk page of the article, or perhaps an RfC to settle the issue for all of the individual episode articles. -Scottywong| spout _ 18:57, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

The Lame Duck Congress

The Lame Duck Congress (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • Stats)

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This article is not the subject of any significant amount of discussion, is not one of the ones attached to an Emmy, and is not notable. The content has already been merged with the season article. (Disputed PROD). Sven Manguard Wha? 20:22, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

• Keep unless there is consensus to merge all West Wing episode articles (or for the default to be merge, with the exception being Emmys and so on). WP doesn't necessarily need to cover individual episodes in this amount of detail, but given that we do, we're doing a disservice to the reader by leaving them wondering what happened between "And It's Surely to Their Credit" and "The Portland Trip." –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 21:37, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Television-related deletion discussions.  Gongshow ^Talk 22:18, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

• Merge to season list: my reasoning is outlined here: User:MZMcBride/Edit summaries#westwing. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:50, 8 July 2012 (UTC)
• Keep given the prevailing sentiment on WP, I think these episodes should be kept. The experts at episode article creation could probably make an encyclopedic article out of just about any West Wing episode. (see the closing comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Drought Conditions (2nd nomination))--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:10, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
  • At least part of the closing comments in that AfD are seriously flawed, specifically "while merging may well be a viable long-term solution, if it is to be done, it shouldn't be done one episode at a time." There is no practical way to merge all of the episode articles at the same time. Some have ridiculously long summaries that far exceed what is reasonably expected and specified. WP:TVPLOT says, "As a rough guide, summaries for episode articles should be about 200 to 500 words". However, it also says that for season articles, "a tabular format that sections off each individual episode with its own brief plot section (approximately 100–200 words for each, with upwards of 350 words for complex storylines)". The instructions for {{Episode list}} say "A short 100–300 word summary of the episode." When you have articles like 17 People (570 words), 365 Days (657 words) and 2162 Votes (a massive 1,125 words), there's a fair bit of pruning to do. The only way to merge the episode articles is one at a time. --AussieLegend (talk) 16:29, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

• Redirect to season list and let this be the precedent for the other Westwing episode articles. From sporadic browsing, it seems the vast majority of Westwing ep articles suffer the same inadequacies as this one (WP:NOT#PLOT and WP:TRIVIA). – sgeureka ^t•c 08:50, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
• Keep per past precedent and WP:OUTCOMES - there appears to be a weak consensus to keep all articles of episodes of popular/hit TV shows. Bearian (talk) 18:37, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
• Delete or Redirect (with a preference for delete). I went through all of The West Wing episode articles and there are about 130 that fail WP:PLOT or have serious issues that stop these articles from meeting our guidelines, including WP:N. All episodes are listed at User:AussieLegend/The West Wing for anyone who is interested. Nobody seems interested in improving any of the articles, which is why I was so frustrated to see articles that I had merged back to the season articles and then redirected or prodded, later restored. The only interest seems to be in keeping articles that fail to meet our guidelines and there is no point in doing this when the article is redundant to the season list. There was a reason for some of the articles when the season articles didn't exist and the content couldn't be incorporated into List of The West Wing episodes, but I created the missing season articles (seasons 1-5) and reworked the two that already existed (seasons 6 & 7). Nobody had even bothered creating seasons 1-5 so there's little chance they'd bother with the episode articles. I agree with sgeureka that this should set a precedent for all The West Wing episode articles. There's no reason why any of the 130 non-complying articles should continue to exist. There are some episodes that are notable and these should remain but the rest should all be deleted. --AussieLegend (talk) 14:40, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
• Note for the closer - This discussion closure should take into account the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Let Bartlet Be Bartlet‎. They were nominated at the same time by the same nominator. - jc37 17:54, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
• Keep, per User:TonyTheTiger, and others above. - jc37 17:57, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
• Keep The nomination states that content from this article was merged into another. We must therefore keep the edit history of this article to satisfy our licensing - see WP:MAD for more details. The issue of which page this content should best appear on is a matter of ordinary editing, not deletion, and so our editing policy applies. Warden (talk) 18:42, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
  • We keep the edit history by redirecting the article, not by keeping the article in its current, non-compliant form. --AussieLegend (talk) 19:43, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
• Keep Every episode has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject and therefore it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article.... Mcewan (talk) 01:07, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
• Delete and redirect to season list. The article (or this discussion) does not contain references to the sort of substantial third-party coverage needed to pass WP:GNG.  Sandstein  05:51, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
• AFD is not a substitute for cleanup. I cannot say "keep" or "delete" yet because of this article's poor condition. Unfortunately, keep and delete votes come in the way, so I cannot say "speedy" either. For someone who is a fan of the show, balance is required for a stand alone article.

  Redirect to The West Wing (season 2), which would be the best choice. Even if one episode wins awards, still it needs balance for a stand-alone. --George Ho (talk) 15:07, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

• Keep If we're going to start deleting episodes of every major TV series that has articles for each episodes, then that discussion should be had elsewhere. Merging is clearly not tenable, for if you merge 20+ articles to a single list, then you're going be getting warning about pages being too long, unless you are actually deleting content. Nfitz (talk) 19:09, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I'm afraid your assertion is incorrect. The longest season article for The West Wing is season 4, which has 23 episodes. 23 episodes at the maximum 300 words per episode summary gives you about 43kB of prose including non-episode summary prose. WP:SIZERULE specifies 40kB as the "Length alone does not justify division" boundary. 50kB is the "May need to be divided" point. Since most episode summaries are less than 300kB, the pages are unlikely to cause any grief and there are plenty of season articles that are longer than this. For example, despite having 68 episodes and some excessively long episode summaries, there have never been any size warnings at List of The Penguins of Madagascar episodes (season 2), which is more than twice the length that these articles would ever be. --AussieLegend (talk) 19:51, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
    • There are a couple of mistakes in this assumption that you'd only have 300 words per episode. This page alone has over 350 words of content that would need moving, and some individual episodes are much larger. More using one of these article proposed for AFD as a gauge, there's about 366 words taking in 2,185 characters - or 2.13 kB. 23 more articles like that give you 49 kB - assuming you keep them all below 300 words; it's not hard to imagine that it would be easy to be exceeding the 50 kB criteria. I hope most episode summaries are less than 300kB? Which ones are bigger? And really - your going to compare an series of 23 episodes of drama, each 42 minutes long, to a series of 68 10-minute cartoons? That's over 100 kB long???? Doesn't that kind of prove my point? If 680 minutes of material produces pages that are too long, surely 966 minutes of material will be even worse. I think you need to respect the science, Kowalski! Nfitz (talk) 20:34, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
      • No, there are no mistakes, at least not at my end. Merging isn't simply a case of copying and pasting. As I've explained above,[1] the instructions for {{Episode list}}, which is used in the season articles, say the the episode summary should be 100–300 words. Part of the merge process (at least when carried out correctly) is to trim the episode summary so that it is 300 words or less. Some of the episode summaries are already less than that. Episode length is irrelevant to the comparison I provided above, which relates to page size, not the length of the episodes. However, if you want to relate it to episode length, despite being only 10 minutes each, the episode summaries average out at 165 words each, or 16.5 words per minute. Translate that to 42 minutes and the summary would be 693 words, more than twice what the instructions say. --AussieLegend (talk) 23:08, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
        • There have been many mistakes on your end. For example, you said above that the Penguins of Madagascar page was fine ... yet at over 100 kB, it far exceeds the maximum recommended page size. And don't forget that accident with Jiggles. Nfitz (talk) 01:45, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
          • No, what I said in response to your mistaken claim that "if you merge 20+ articles to a single list, then you're going be getting warning about pages being too long", which I see now was apparently was based on your misconception that merging meant copying and pasting everything which it doesn't, was "despite having 68 episodes and some excessively long episode summaries, there have never been any size warnings". Nowhere did I say it was fine. In fact I was the person who tagged that article with {{plot}} immediately after splitting it from the main list.[2] Your second mistake in your post is claiming the page "far exceeds the maximum recommended page size". Yes, the page is 112,039 bytes right now, but that is the file size. WP:SIZERULE does not refer to file size, it refers to readable prose, (this is actually stated at WP:SIZERULE - you must have missed the note) which does not inluded "footnotes and reference sections ("see also", "external links", bibliography, etc.); diagrams and images; tables and lists; Wikilinks and external URLs; and formatting and mark-up."[3] For this reason List of The Penguins of Madagascar episodes (season 2) only really has 191 bytes of readable prose, although if you include table content it's up around 67kB, which is not far above the 60kB "Probably should be divided" size. --AussieLegend (talk) 10:15, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
• Delete The episode summary is duplicated at The West Wing (season 2), and the article contains no information supporting notability. Due to the title being a generic political phrase that could be used to refer to an actual congress, a delete is preferable to a redirect.G. C. Hood (talk) 13:11, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
• Delete per WP:PLOT and WP:TVSHOW and Help:Merging. --→gab 24dot grab← 19:39, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I see nothing in WP:PLOT or WP:TVSHOW that pertains to this. Can you expand your thoughts? Nfitz (talk) 01:50, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
    • There is no real-world treatment, other than the unsourced WP:OR in the "Timeline" section (fiction doesn't necessarily follow the same timeline as the real world - That '70s Show and Desperate Housewives are two good examples of this.). WP:PLOT says "Wikipedia treats fiction in an encyclopedic manner, discussing the reception and significance of notable works in addition to a concise summary." There is no discussion of reception and no demonstration that this episode is notable. The article is essentially a plot-only description and therefore is what Wikipedia is not. I can't seak for WP:TVSHOW but there are plenty of others that this episode does not stand up to: WP:N, WP:V and WP:TVEP just to mention a few. --AussieLegend (talk) 10:29, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

from WP:TVSHOW "However, the presence or absence of reliable sources is more definitive than the geographic range of the program's audience alone"-- The Red Pen of Doom 13:01, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

• merge - while there may be claims that sources exist, none have been produced during this discussion, nor in the 6 six months that it has been tagged as lacking sources, nor in the 6 years the article has been in existence. When the sources are produced then the stand alone article can be recreated. -- The Red Pen of Doom 11:59, 17 July 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.