Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Timeline of Pokémon

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. RL0919 (talk) 00:03, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Timeline of Pokémon

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This article, I believe, fails standards immensely. There is no inclusion criteria for this list, for a start, and with a franchise as large as Pokémon, it's unclear what makes the cut. Should releases of games be included? Release dates for consoles that host these games? When merchandising and crossovers are announced or released? Should anniversaries be commemorated? Should associated companies that are relevant have important fixtures included? I could go on, but this timeline is very indiscriminate in what it includes, and thus is very unhelpful to readers, as there is no clear idea of what is actually important to the franchise's history, whether it be in terms of release information or otherwise. Additionally, this timeline only covers major dates, and no actual historical background. This information is covered at the main Pokémon article already in far greater depth, with notable releases and developments covered there. There are already several infoboxes with release schedules for important subgroups as well that can be used at other articles with far greater aid to readability. Given all relevant info is covered at the parent article, and this list itself is incredibly unwieldy and impossible to properly organize/categorize in any context, this list feels incredibly unhelpful and redundant to readers. Has one ever considered Magneton? Pokelego999 (talk) 19:02, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Video games-related deletion discussions. Has one ever considered Magneton? Pokelego999 (talk) 19:02, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Entertainment, History, and Lists. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 19:09, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. As the nominator pointed out, it's not clear what the inclusion criteria here are. There's an entry for "Tenth anniversary of the Pokémon anime". Okay, should anniversaries for everything else also be included? Which ones? Fives and tens? This list is largely pointless; we already have articles for the games and for Pokémon as a franchise. Cortador (talk) 19:50, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as a redundant to the already existing Pokemon series and List of Pokemon games articles. It's like a worse, bullet-point version of those articles. Sergecross73 msg me 19:55, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I'm not seeing clear inclusion criteria here, timeline can mean many things including game releases, anime or manga releases, store openings, etc. It falls under indiscriminate lists. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 20:53, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and cleanup; second choice merge as there's at least potential here. (Canvassing disclaimer: Saw this due to the nominator mentioning it on Discord.) Yes, there are some bad items on this list like anniversaries of unclear notability - just remove them? And yes, stronger inclusion criteria would also be nice. But none of these are reasons to delete. Having a clean, "bullet point version" of the main article that is strictly chronological rather than prose hopping between different media types can be a useful thing. The nominator seems to mention this when saying "covered in far greater depth in the main article" - well yes, that's the point, this is a clean links-only version that's easier to find stuff in, "Greater depth" isn't always desired. This article seems like a great start toward making such a resource. I dunno, in more "serious" topics, it's not uncommon to have both a simple table of Governors of Province X and the same info in more depth in "History of Province X" in prose. That's... fine. Both the list article and the prose article are useful; I'd say that this timeline is far less "unwieldly". SnowFire (talk) 21:59, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Note: I removed the anniversaries of unclear importance. And I again want to emphasize that I'm not saying the timeline is perfect, it's far from it, but that many of the complaints above sound like reasons to delete any timeline, e.g. "impossible to properly organize/categorize in any context" - the organization is the date it happened. That's it. There is no categorization other than again by date. That's how timelines work, and IMO that can be useful sometimes. SnowFire (talk) 22:10, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My main concerns are less so improvement, but that there are several large-scale problems that are difficult to resolve. I can definitely agree it may be decently useful in most other contexts, but Pokémon is such a wide franchise as to where determining what is actually useful to audiences is downright impossible because of how much goes on with it. It's easy enough to clean out anniversaries, but how do you choose what to include? If you choose to include important dates in development, then it just overlaps with the main Pokemon article in a worse context even more than it already is. If you choose to focus on game releases, then List of Pokémon video games covers that. If you focus on the anime, Pokémon (TV series) already has its own navigational boxes. If you focus on meshing them together, then that's just two lists randomly smushed together that have no real need being tacked on to each other when they're better covered separately. If you want to include more occasions, then what do you choose? Real world events? How do you determine which are notable enough to cover? Do you cover every single tournament and site pop-up? If you expand the scope to far, then it just becomes a list of everything vaguely Pokemon related that's occurred, which just falls under Wikipedia:INDISCRIMINATE, as there's no real rhyme or reason to these all being in this timeline together that benefits the reader because these subjects are all so wildly random and not very substantial to the series' overall development. There's so many moving variables, and if you were to include everything, it would just be a more unwieldy version of the multiple easier to use lists. It's not like a lot of timelines where their information is valuable in the context of a timeline, as we have several other versions of this around the website already that are infinitely more readable and usable and have less problems with inclusion criteria, while being infinitely more helpful in terms of their navigational use and educational use. This list is just largely unnecessary and impractical, hence my argument for deletion here.

I will note on the canvassing concern- I had asked about this list in the Discord earlier today to get another opinion before I took any action on it, which was a discussion entirely unrelated to this AfD. I took care in not acknowledging or linking to this AfD after the fact in order to prevent potential problems, and if there were further actions to take beside that, then that's a mistake on my part, and I'll seek to improve on that in the future. Either way, it's very much not my intention to canvass, and if I did so unintentionally, then I do apologize. Has one ever considered Magneton? Pokelego999 (talk) 22:45, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To be clear I wasn't accusing you of the "bad" form of canvassing. Rather I always state this if the only reason I know about an AFD is via Discord to avoid complaints if a bunch of people who don't normally vote on a topic suddenly show up for unclear reasons - it makes the reason more clear. I suppose we might need a new term for "canvassing" (negative, accusatory) and "canvassing" (neutral, factual report to put off-wiki influence "on the record"), but it's the second meaning.

Anyway, for a topic like "Timeline of Pokemon", I'd say that the answer is yes to all of the above? Sure, include media, video games, business, and culture together here. In fact, it's what gives this timeline more reason to exist separate from things like the List of Pokémon video games article. If I was very hardcore on the topic and trying to make it featured-quality, then I'd start with the very best published sources on it, see if they include tables or timelines, see what they think is relevant to include, and then try to tie them together - e.g. things that appear in multiple sources are more likely to be "relevant" enough to include. It can be tough, but it's no different than the discretion editors exercise in every other article. Even many lists have to struggle with the same issue - take a games list, what about an obscure flip phone mobile game? A now-unplayable web Flash game? Cameos? Fan-games but big and popular ones? The answer is, as usual, to reflect the sources. This article definitely needs work to draw from "Pokemon histories" rather than individual links, but it could exist, which is why at worst it should be redirected & merged while waiting on such published, strong sources to clarify the inclusion criteria. SnowFire (talk) 23:32, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with this is the fact there aren't many sources showing a whole chronological timeline like this to verify this information. I found plenty of in-depth sources, but those only covered the early days of the franchise's history. Beyond that, there aren't many overarching sources to look for to characterize what should or should not be included, and many lists and sources I could find that were chronological either lacked dates, were only covering a small sample pool (Such as the main series games exclusively) or both. I'm afraid this approach just doesn't really work here. Without sources to verify it, it's entirely up to editors to decide what is "relevant," which is something that can't really be decided effectively per my above rationale. Has one ever considered Magneton? Pokelego999 (talk) 00:23, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete The article's purpose and criteria is very questionable, not to mention redundant. While I recognize SnowFire's argument above I think it's an overly generous view of the article.--Kung Fu Man (talk) 07:36, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as a chaotic mish-mash news ticker. Pokémon (video game series) presents the info much better. – sgeureka ^t•c 13:05, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as this topic isn't notable or discriminate. This is an encyclopedia and we use prose, not bullets, unless there's a truly compelling reason why prose is insufficient. Shooterwalker (talk) 13:42, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Nobody is proposing the prose article be deleted and replaced by this timeline. Of course the prose article is the main encyclopedia article. But we also have tons of lists and annexes and such spun-off to separate pages. This page should stand or fall on its own, not on whether it's considered more or less useful than other articles. Sometimes, just "1789-1796: Term of George Washington as president" with a wikilink is enough information, and we don't need a long prose digression. SnowFire (talk) 19:25, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Pokeglo writes above "The problem with this is the fact there aren't many sources showing a whole chronological timeline like this to verify this information." This is a pure coincidence, but at the supermarket today, I saw that TIME magazine had a Pokemon 25th anniversary "issue" (can read about it at https://www.thegamer.com/time-magazine-special-edition-pokemon-issue-amazon/ ). In it, it has a full graphical timeline (pages 33-39) across games, television shows, movies, and other developments. I want to stress that I was not even looking for this and randomly bumbled into this - perhaps a stroke of good fortune, but perhaps a sign that this kind of timeline is a valid topic that does indeed have sources that verify this information, and is indeed notable. (Note that this timeline was rather more sparse, covering just the major stuff, so not quite as detailed as this Wikipedia page, but it's still evidence that a "Pokemon timeline" is a valid and sourcable topic.) SnowFire (talk) 19:25, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Merge. The content of this article should be merged into Pokémon. I think it spills into WP:REDUNDANT because this is simply outlining events that could be mentioned in the Pokemon article or Pokemon-related articles. Sackkid (talk) 23:07, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Valid spinout article. Their video games, card games, television shows, and movies, all get ample coverage, and all have their own individual articles or are grouped in articles. Listing when they came out and information about them is a perfectly valid information and navigational list. Dream Focus 23:38, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No one doubts Pokemon media gets coverage. But we already have Pokemon (series), Pokemon (video game series), Pokemon (TV series), List of Pokemon films, List of Pokemon manga, etc etc etc. What part of this article isn't already covered in an already existing series/list article? Sergecross73 msg me 13:16, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Pokemon (series) redirects to Pokemon. There are no articles that list everything in a timeline like this. This makes it easy to see what came out in which media year by year. Dream Focus 23:46, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I simply added unnecessary disambiguation, because Pokemon is an overarching franchise article just like I thought it was. The rest kind of missed my point there. And you didn't answer my question, unsurprisingly. Sergecross73 msg me 11:14, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The main Pokemon article is so large, that the timeline you would normally find in such an article, was spun out into this separate article. This valid encyclopedic content has to go somewhere, and not spread out into multiple other articles. Dream Focus 22:20, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not DF, but: I'm sure all of it is covered in the other articles, or should be. But again, that's just how these work. List of presidents of the United States is theoretically redundant to History of the United States and its subarticles, but it displays the same information in a different, "cleaner" way. That gives it a reason to exist. In the same way, timelines are basically also lists, just "List of XYZ by date". They're similarly useful; a random, unrelated history book at the library I opened just recently had a "Important Dates" section in the front as a resource which was theoretically redundant, but summarized the scope of time in four pages that the rest of the book took 160 pages on and provided an anchoring framework to keep in mind. And as far as the other articles, presumably the "value add" is that this Timeline is a combination across all of video games, TV series, business, and culture.

Basically, most timelines could be decried as "worse, bullet-point versions of other articles", but there is clearly an audience that does find them useful (source: all those books that do include timelines). To the extent it's a general complaint rather than something specific to this specific Pokemon timeline, it's not actually a deletion rationale, IMO. SnowFire (talk) 16:44, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess this one will just come down to a consensus on editorial philosophy then. I personally don't subscribe to this "everything is redundant if you think about it" philosophy. My stance is closer to WP:OVERLAP. Sergecross73 msg me 21:49, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: valid WP:SPLITLIST -My, oh my! (Mushy Yank) 01:22, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Given the existence of more specific articles. Orientls (talk) 20:57, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do you believe its easier to access the information split up in multiple articles for each media, instead of having a timeline showing it listed out as it is now? Dream Focus 16:48, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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.