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Extravagance

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Unsourced stub, dicdef. Deprodded with a "needs more love" rationale in September but I don't think it's fixable. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • (Otters want attention) 06:29, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

  • Keep It is our policy to keep short articles with potential - they are called stubs. Our dictionary policy explains at length that shortness is not proper grounds for considering an article to be a dictionary definition. And, as for TPH's extravagant claim that the article cannot possibly be improved, please don't get me started. The rest is the argument to avoid of WP:NOEFFORT. Colonel Warden (talk) 19:47, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Keep. Would appear to be a notable subject, though the article is not what it could be ... but as CW says, that is not reason for deletion.--Epeefleche (talk) 06:20, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Keep Not just a dictionary definition, it now mentions more of it. It was one of the seven deadly sins! Something taught to people for centuries is notable. The article has been edited with some improvements. [1] Google news search shows politicians and queens shunning "extravagance" and criticizing different political parties for it. [2] Perhaps some sources can be found from there. Dream Focus 10:32, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
    • Correction I took a look at this claim that "extravagance" in anything like our modern sense was ever a deadly sin. What I found ratified WP:DICTDEF wisdom: we shouldn't try to be lexicographers here, we're amateurs, and our intuitions are relatively useless. I immediately found three scholarly references making it quite clear that the Latin luxuria of Pope Gregory's and Dante's time is far better glossed as "lust" or "lechery", rather than wastefulness, indulgence in luxury or spendthrift habits. Yakushima (talk) 11:11, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Note: The article under discussion here has been {{rescue}} flagged by an editor for the Article Rescue Squadron to review. SnottyWong talk 18:24, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Delete until such time that it can be shown that an article can be written on the subject that is more than a standard dictionary entry. SnottyWong talk 18:24, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
  • The dictionary entry policy has already been rebutted but, as you still seem to misunderstand and misuse it, please note the following passages which clarify this further:
"One perennial source of confusion is that a stub encyclopedia article looks very much like a stub dictionary article, and stubs are often poorly written."
"Another perennial source of confusion is that some paper dictionaries, such as "pocket" dictionaries, lead editors to the mistaken belief that dictionary articles are short, and that short article and dictionary article are therefore equivalent.
"Note that dictionary and encyclopedia articles do not differ simply on grounds of length."
So, to use the WP:DICDEF policy, it is not relevant to comment on the length of the article. You must instead show that the topic is a purely lexical one, being only about the word as a particular piece of language, rather than being about the topic which the word denotes. Colonel Warden (talk) 19:20, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
The article, as it currently exists, discusses nothing other than the word's lexical use. There may or may not be an opportunity to expand the article beyond that, but that is immaterial because the article in its current state is nothing more than a dictionary definition, and dictionary definitions do not belong on Wikipedia. SnottyWong comment 21:39, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
  • The article already does more than discuss the lexical meaning of a particular word. For example, it tells us that classical authors condemned it as vice. You were perhaps confused by some references to their language but these are matters of translation, given that they wrote in Latin and Greek. In using a variety of different words to reference the topic, the article demonstrates that it is not concerned with a particular one but with the topic which is behind these various words. In any case, we have moved on to a modern psychological view too and so the article continues to develop.
  • Correction "... it tells us that classical authors condemned it as vice." Actually not. It The source cited doesn't say that high spending on luxury is sinful per se, only that it lends itself to vice or (in the case of allowing one's daughters to dress finely, possibly seeming to be prostitutes) to the perception of vice. In general, I take a dim view of trying to translate the terms of ancient texts as if they had precise modern equivalents, especially with value-laden terms subject to cultural change -- it reflects a terribly naive view of how language works, for one thing. And when amateurs weigh in to do it, we get the confusion of "luxuria" (lechery) with latterday "luxury", which has already led to dressing this article with a graphic that wasn't even relevant. Yakushima (talk) 11:47, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • WP:DICTDEF has been exhaustively refuted above. Please do not cite this policy without reading and understanding it. Colonel Warden (talk) 19:20, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Please do not conflate wikt:tendentious with wikt:exhaustive. "A goat is a four-legged quadruped. [Famous person] owned a goat.[citation]" is not an encyclopaedic article. Neither is this. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 05:59, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Your example does not seem to serve your argument as goat is a blue link. Your position seems to be to deny the validity of any stub. This guideline states "A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which — though providing some useful information — is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, and which is capable of expansion.". Do you contend that all stubs should be deleted? If not, please explain how this case differs from other stubs. Colonel Warden (talk) 07:57, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • (personal attack deleted) my example should have stated ..."If goat only said 'A goat is a four-legged...'" Satisfied? Of course this in no way changes my blindingly obvious point, (personal attack deleted). No CW, it does not provide "some useful information" -- it is, as I said, simply a WP:DICTDEF, with a random irrelevant detail tacked on. It provides its reader nothing "useful", the only 'use' of it is to provide an excuse for not deleting the article. Did I state that "all stubs should be deleted?" NO! (personal attack deleted). Are all stubs of the type "WP:DICTDEF + random irrelevant detail"? No they are not. Do some stubs, that are not of that type, provide "some useful information" Yes they do. Did anything I said indicate to anybody (personal attack deleted) that I advocated that "all stubs should be deleted?" Of course it bleeding well didn't! So why did you bother with such a (personal attack deleted) misrepresentation of my comment? HrafnTalkStalk(P) 08:27, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Caution Careful, there, Hrafn. You let him get your goat. As it were. Stick to the facts. For example: did the Colonel in fact exhaustively refute the argument for deletion from WP:NOTDICT? Actually, he only cited one point from it: a stub isn't automatically a virtual dictionary entry. Did the article contain, as you claim, only lexical information about "extravagance"? Actually not -- it contained commentary on the classics in which the gloss of "extravagance" might be so loose as to suggest that those ancient words (really: the concepts they possibly denoted) deserve full Wikipedia article treatment far more than "extravagance" ever could in English Wikipedia. "Extravagance" can also apply to claims -- in fact, the Colonel has already used it that way in this very discussion, above -- but where does discussion of such extravagance appear in the article itself? Nowhere. By taking this tack, you show why we have WP:NOTDICT in the first place -- if a word has some general applicability, it might denote a concept, but it's not (ipso facto) a topic. If one wants to discuss extravagance in its full generality, that's potentially a lexical topic, but if so, it should be done in lexical resources -- e.g., Wiktionary -- not Wikipedia. Yakushima (talk) 12:10, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Careless, there Yakushima -- addition of obscure (to the point of irrelevance) semantic trivia does not make it either (i) any less a DICTDEF, (ii) "some useful information" or (iii) an encyclopaedic article. If some poor alien read Wikipedia to find out what "Extravagance" is, they would find out that the most important things about it are (i) it was once considered to be one of the deadly sins & (ii) that it is the name given for one of the (endpoints of the) scales on the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire. Said alien would be hopelessly confused. This editor is confused as to why anybody considers this to be the foundation of anything (personal attack deleted). HrafnTalkStalk(P) 12:36, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Pretty careless of you to not notice, in the above, that I'm quite in agreement with your position, simply opposed to your debating tactics. Again: show how the Keep-voters are persistently wrong in the facts, both about the topic and the guidelines. Positing some "poor alien" takes the discussion into realms of the imagination, and is rhetorically flimsy. A "poor alien" wouldn't be possessed our our common sense, and it's common sense that should tell anyone that this is a dictionary topic, not an encyclopedic one. Yakushima (talk) 14:26, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • My apologies for positing an inadequate tabula rosa and employing inadequate rhetorical skills. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 15:55, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Deletion I have removed your "unsourced negative comments" about Colonel Warden and about me, per WP:AFDEQ. I have replaced them with notations to that effect, per my proposal that such deletions should always be noted in AfD debates.[3] Yakushima (talk) 03:34, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Colonel Warden: kindly cease and desist misrepresenting my comments.
  • Yakushima: kindly cease and desist refactoring my comments.
  • Keep - This proposal I am shocked on. This is one of the original seven deadly sins. I am convinced there is a ton of material on this is hard copy - specifically from historians. The meaning of this original sin compared to what it was replaced with (lust) is vastly different. Is the article currently a stub? Sure. However, I am sure that there is plenty of room for expansion if someone has access to a library. Turlo Lomon (talk) 16:18, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
    • Correction "This is one of the original seven deadly sins." Actually not. I immediately found three scholarly sources glossing the "luxuria" of Bosch's time as "lust" or "lechery". The English translation of Bosch's "luxuria" was given as "extravagance", but the original Dutch was "wellust" -- basically, "lust". See current Seven Deadly Sins for the references I've added. As for the Bosch illustration, it's been removed as irrelevant. Yakushima (talk) 11:37, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Delete. Per WP:NOTDICT, and my comments above on factual errors in the arguments of those voting Keep. Yakushima (talk) 12:13, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment. I have edited the article to remove references to extravagance having been one of the Seven Deadly Sins. As far as I can tell, "luxuria", when it was on that list as such, always meant sexual excess, not profligate and conspicuous consumption or "luxury". Please read the sources cited at Seven Deadly Sins, for verification. Yakushima (talk) 14:51, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment. I can see a case here for an article Extravagance (psychology). [4] It seems to have particular technical meanings (not necessarily identical, though) in more than one personality inventory (Temperament and Character Inventory is one that I've identified). And it apparently has notable genetic correlates. For now, the part of this article discussing one (but only one) psychological measure of extravagance will be replaced by a brief reference to the term's use in measuring Novelty seeking. Yakushima (talk) 15:16, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment. Well, now it turns out that Greek "tryphé" is a pretty specifically Ptolemaic concept referring not just to our idea of "extravagance" but also "magnificence" in the service of political ends, together with a kind of gauzy femininity.[5] Hm, doesn't sound much like that time my little brother bought a sports car he couldn't afford. So much for the idea that a single translated word can represent the same topic. I'd say tryphé might deserve its own article. But "extravagance"? It's just a word in English. Yakushima (talk) 15:47, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Keep It's widely established that this particular article lacks much... but what I haven't seen in skimming the above discussion is what an encyclopedic article on extravagance should become. Looking through the first few pages of the Google Scholar results, I see a number of papers on widely divergent topics which explore the concept of extravagance in some field or another. Of course, there are also a ton of false positives where extravagance seems entirely peripheral to the topic of the paper. The above statement by Yakushima is quite incorrect--extravagance is no more "just a word in English" than love is. Nor do I think the keep arguments hinge around obscure or arcane theological uses. "Extravagance" in Wikipedia should land somewhere sensible which discusses the topic in an encyclopedic manner, including a wikt link. There is nothing inherently wrong with the current article which prevents it from evolving into that. Jclemens (talk) 20:03, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
    • Comment If you "haven't seen in skimming the above discussion [...] what an encyclopedic article on extravagance should become," it's because those who are voting Keep haven't been supplying anything. If you "see a number of papers on widely divergent topics which explore the concept of extravagance in some field or another," it's very likely because (a) they are using it in some specialized sense (e.g., Derridean extravagance, file under "Derrida" and the like) or (b) the real topic isn't "extravagance" but another topic entirely (file under that topic in Wikipedia.) As I edit the article, checking sources, mainly I discover that its purported facts don't check out, or they are about specialized terminology, and the article gets ever smaller. "Luxuria" didn't mean "extravagance" in Hieronymous Bosch's time -- so, out goes his Seven Deadly Sins painting as an illustration and the claim that "extravagance" was one of the Seven Deadly Sins. "tryphé" as a Ptolemaic concept seems to have rather pronounced political semantics, and the Roman reaction to "tryphé" might have been partly a republic's propaganda response to Ptolemaic excesses. Wikipedia already has psychology articles covering the sense of "extravagance" used in the study of novelty-seeking. The "extravagance" article can hardly be anything but all the things one might say about the use of the word (a dictionary's legitimate role), or foreign language words that are supposedly direct translations -- in which case one should cite RS by exports purporting that the concepts are equivalent. It might turn out, for example, that "Derridean extravagance" is some concept so far removed from our normal sense of "extravagance" as to deserve a separate article with a section saying why it doesn't mean "extravagance". As it is, most of the things that have been said so far in this article are, in some way, wrong or off the point. What's correct? Is extravagance "unrestrained excess"? Sure. But is there anything one can't do too much of, or have too much of? Is there any excess that can't be unrestrained? Do we add something to this article about astronomy if some astronomer happens to describe a supernova as "an extravagant stellar display"? Given that one can have too much of anything, what don't we talk about in this article? Love, by contrast, is a feeling, it excludes other concepts. It's not an object, or an action, and it can preclude other feelings. Yakushima (talk) 03:24, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment. I have created Tryphé. It has just survived one speedy delete attempt. Tag it as you wish, but I think it's an actual encyclopedic topic, and one that goes beyond mere "extravagance". And I have accordingly moved the text describing Tryphé to Tryphé, while leaving a wikilink as a "see also" entry. Yakushima (talk) 17:28, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Keep Deletion is the last resort, and should only be considered after rejecting the possibility that the article can be improved. The dicdefs we should be removing are only the ones that are not capable of being expanded. If they are capable of expansion, they should be regarded as the beginnings of an article, that will benefit anyone who comes along to continue them. I've said elsewhere that I consider almost any common noun that has more than a few occurrences in English capable of being an article for the thing it describes (assuming the thing is of any notability, of course, which is usually but not always the case). This will be true of abstract as well as concrete topics--few English words for abstract topics are complete synonyms. I fail to see the merit of the argument that it overlaps other subjects--essentially everything overlaps other subjects. People have discussed this as a specific concept, and therefore it is capable of being made into an article. Papers on " widely divergent topics which explore the concept of extravagance in some field or another," do justify an article. That the sources could have used other language and been written about a slightly different subject does not invalidatethat the did actually write about this one, DGG ( talk ) 18:07, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
    • Reply. If you in fact "consider almost any common noun that has more than a few occurrences in English capable of being an article for the thing it describes", why not start the articles commonness, occurrences, capability (disambig page), article (disambig page), description (tech term for rhetorical device), all of which are used in that claim or are common nouns derived from them? Yakushima (talk) 11:59, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment. I note that nearly all of the content of this article that was there at the time of this deletion nomination, and that has been added since, has been removed by an editor who !voted "delete" above. How can we have a proper informed discussion when the article that we are supposed to be discussing is gutted in this way, meaning that anyone commenting has to spend ages digging around in the article history? Phil Bridger (talk) 21:30, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
    • Reply. I decided to time myself in "digging around in the article history", to determine how [long] it would take to find [out] how it looked before AfD nomination. From noting the date of AfD posting above, from start to finish, it took about one minute to get to this: [6]. And I was moving slowly. From there you can move forward through the edits, see my edit summaries in context, and square them with the account I give above (since I commented on every major step oi the process of putting this article on a diet.) That's a smallish fraction (maybe 10-20%) of the total time it should take to consider all the arguments and evidence presented above. If you find that smallish fraction an insuperable barrier, I'm sure there are easier AfDs you could be working on instead. Yakushima (talk) 10:22, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Note also that User:Yakushima's actions in re this topic started directly after this angry outburst elsewhere. My impression is that these actions of removing sourced content from this article and creating the content fork of tryphé are disruption contrary to WP:POINT and WP:HARASS. It could all be coincidence, of course, but I mention the possibility so that you may be fully informed without having to dig further into the edit histories. Colonel Warden (talk) 22:53, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Reply. CW indicates WP:POINT. The first sentence of that guideline starts "When one becomes frustrated with the way a policy or guideline is being applied ..." But--I'm not angry about that here. Quite the contrary. Is WP:DICT "being applied" here? No guideline/policy is being applied here until the admin closes the AfD, so there's nothing for me to be angry about. Unless CW believes he's applying policy. But last I checked, he wasn't an admin on Wikipedia. (OK: I was angry at the way CW was personally attacked above, and was also angered when the attacker reverted my edits--which were all made per relevant guidelines. But that's not what CW is talking about here, I'm sure.) CW also indicates WP:HARASS. That starts with "[h]arassment is defined as a pattern of offensive behavior that appears to a reasonable observer to have the purpose of adversely affecting a targeted person or persons ...." Excuse me, can anyone here tell who is the target of this harassment CW thinks he sees? CW? Sure, maybe the editor who personally attacked CW above was guilty of WP:HARASS, because he was definitely offensive -- check this AfDs edit history if you're interested. But surely CW should then be thankful that I cited policy in edits to revert those attacks. So is CW accusing me of harassing him in some way? He needs to show precisely where I've done that. CW further points to what he calls an "angry outburst." I invite you all to go look not only at that edit, and the whole AfD discussion it concluded, but also at how the admin closed that AfD: in favor of the argument summarized in precisely the comment CW calls an "angry outburst." Last I checked, angry outbursts brought censure from admins, not agreement. Now, CW may have a point about a possible violation of WP:CONTENTFORK. One might say that the POV I'm supposedly pushing is that tryphé is so much more than mere extravagance that it really has no place in extravagance, except perhaps where I left it: wikilinked in the See Also section. Yet, despite remarking several times about my opinion on tryphé, nobody here has argued otherwise (not even CW). I invite you all to look at tryphé for yourselves and see if you think it's an encyclopedic topic. Then come back to extravagance and ask yourselves: don't you think there might be some semantic extravagance ("unrestrained excess") in any claim that tryphé is a mere subtopic of extravagance? (Uh-oh, now we have to add something to extravagance because we found yet another use for the mere word: in semantics. See how this works, people? See why we have WP:NOTDICT?) Yakushima (talk) 10:56, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
  • P.S. Disrupting Wikipedia to make a point is against policy, but having a point in mind while improving Wikipedia doesn't seemed to be frowned upon anywhere. IMNSHO, here are the improvements I've made to Wikipedia in the course of this AfD:
  • tryphé -- a new article about a fascinating historical topic.
  • Removed simplistic discussion of tryphé from extravagance.
  • Removed a factual error -- the claim that luxuria meant "extravagance", and that it was one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
  • Corrected Seven Deadly Sins to reflect the above correction.
  • Corrected the caption on the luxuria inset from the Hieronymous Bosch painting about the Seven Deadly Sins to reflect the above correction.
  • It's not clear exactly what personality-inventory psychologists mean with their various measures (possible incommensurable) of what they call "extravagance", so leaving a mere pointer to the fact that psychologists measure some such thing (which might not correspond very closely to the vernacular sense) was also an improvement.
  • And if all those improvements made it quite clear that the article before and during this AfD didn't ever really have much more content that a dictionary definition, that's also an improvement to the article: the distracting underbrush is cleared, and if what remains passes WP:N (somehow -- get to work people, if you really believe that!), the real work can start.
Yakushima (talk) 13:42, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
  • P.P.S. Insinuation of a charge of WP:POINT and WP:HARASS by CW, however (who admits he can't prove any such thing, and apparently discourages other people from investigating, implying he's pretty much summarized the case against me) .... well, CW, what's the applicable policy about such insinuations? Anyone else here want to guess? Yakushima (talk) 13:42, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment. I've edited the article to provide (perhaps only as a suggestion, mind you) a draft introductory paragraph for the introduction to the full-fledged article that might grow out of this stub, if the article passes AfD. I hope this addresses some of the complaints above, about the deletions and slimming-down I've done during AfD, all of which I think were at least appropriate -- where they were not actually required -- under the various relevant guidelines and policies. Yakushima (talk) 05:05, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Delete - Run-of-the-mill dicdef, per others. Note that I have indeed read through Mr. Warden's fevered responses to this, and reject them completely, so please no "OMG U DON"T UNDERSTAND DICDEF" responses. Thanks. This is just a common English word, there's really nothing to say about it beyond what it means, and trying to puff up the article length with examples of extravagance is a pretty hollow/shallow rescue attempt. Tarc (talk) 13:50, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
  • DeletePer DICTDEF, artifically inflated with some random examples not really related to eachother.--Yaksar (let's chat) 20:45, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment. In the apparent default-consensus meaning of the term for purposes of writing this article (i.e., excessive spending), "extravagance" has been around since at least 1727,[7]. So there's been plenty of time to see it emerge as a general-purpose and as a special-purpose encyclopedia topic. Accordingly, I've just done some Google book searches on "encyclopedia" plus "extravagance" plus one each of the supposed categories: "ethics", "finance", "economics" and "psychology". I haven't looked at every book that came up, but so far I have yet to see any Google-accessible encyclopedia volume that lists an actual article devoted to extravagance. They all seem to use it as, well, a word in English. That is to say, they use it as if the reader is supposed to either understand it immediately or look it up in another kind of reference work whose name starts with a D, not an E. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course, but I still don't get why you'd have an article on extravagance any more than you'd have an article on, say, thinness (which redirects to the health condition of being underweight), or plenitude (which redirects to an obscure metaphysical concept: the Plenitude principle). And it appears I'm in good company with compilers of encyclopedias over the last several hundred years. Yakushima (talk) 10:20, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
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