Talk:Skull Bearers (Shannara)

Skull Bearers (Shannara) was a Language and literature good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
September 28, 2008	Good article nominee	Not listed

Novels: Fantasy / Shannara Low‑importance

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Fictional characters

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GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Skull Bearers (Shannara)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Notability

Unfortunately, the article does not establish the real-world notability of these characters. That's not so much a problem with the way the article is written, as that it's just a subject that I don't think will ever be super-notable...the Shannara series itself is quite notable (heck, I loved those books), but an article about one element in them—especially when that element, as far as I can remember, only appeared in the first two books—is going to have a hard time establishing notability. To be honest, I'm sort of straddling a line right now trying to decide if this topic should have its own article at all, or be incorporated into one of the other Shannara articles...as things are right now, the First King of Shannara article doesn't seem like it has a good spot for this stuff (although you might be able to make an argument for listing it under Characters), which is why I don't have a major problem with this being in its own article.

Sources

There are few sources, and a large proportion of them are either primary sources directly from one of the books, or from the Minnie Gong site (which appears to be a fan website). The only two real third-party sources are the last two (the Herbert review and the other one), which are only cited one time each.

Writing style

Overall, the writing is decent, without glaring errors. The Role in the series section, however, is concerning in that it is written pretty much from an in-universe perspective, which needs to be edited out.

Other criteria

All the other good article criteria are pretty much met, and I won't take the time to go through each one here in detail.

Decision

Unfortunately, due to the notability concerns with this article, I cannot pass it to Good Article status. The problems with sources and writing style, which I outlined above, are less serious and could probably be repaired with a few hours or work, but I believe the notability problem is much more serious and difficult to get around. Feel free to leave a message at my talk page if you would like to discuss this decision, to nominate your article again after you feel you have corrected some of the problems, or to request a second opinion. Thank you. —Politizer^{( talk • contribs )} 15:48, 28 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Merge proposal

Merge due to lack of notability e.g. Talk:Skull Bearers (Shannara)/GA1 Widefox; talk 07:40, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This article was proposed for merge with List of Shannara characters in August 2012, by Widefox.

Presumably, the editor who added that tag—User:Widefox—supports the merge.
Support the merge. Rationale: insufficient real-world notability to justify a separate article for a fictional character. Cheers. N2e (talk) 02:31, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

BRD discussion

This discussion is to address a large reversion of an edit I made on August 18th. I had removed a few statements that were unsourced, and had not been sourced by anyone for a couple of months with citations being requested by {{citation needed}} and {{citation needed (lead)}} tags.

I had made a BOLD edit, and another editor—TheEd17—had Reverted it. Next step is to Discuss it on the Talk page, per WP:BRD.

However, when TheEd17 reverted my deletion of the unsourced claims, he did not return the citation needed tags to the article. I have done so now, and the article is back to where it was before my Bold edit of 2013-08-18, so we can have a discussion of the matter, with the article temporarily left in the state it was in before my edit.

Bottom line from my point of view, the information removed was not supported by reliable sources, and no editor had come by to provide good sources to support the claims, or to show notability, which has been previously challenged by another editor (Widefox). Therefore, I believe they should be removed from the article until sources are found.

What is your rationale for leaving them in the article? Is there some sort of policy that says editor-provided descriptions of fictional characters is not subject to Wikipedia core policy of WP:V? Cheers. N2e (talk) 05:49, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]