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Redirects being converted into stand alone articles?

The last few days while doing NPP I've noticed a lot of Dungeons and Dragons related redirects from individual book names in a series and individual character names in games being converted into stubby, poorly referenced stand alone articles. See: Canticle, In Sylvan Shadows, Night Masks, The Fallen Fortress, The Chaos Curse, Nimor Imphraezl, Halisstra Melam, and several more. This seems to be mainly the work of two editors, an IP 65.126.152.254 and FreeKnowledgeCreator. My inclination is to revert the majority of these back into redirects; especially since I don't see any discussion to break them into stand alone articles, and the information seems more organized in the umbrella articles. However, I thought I'd inquire as to if this is some coordinated effort by this project, and if project members think these characters/individual books should have stand alone articles? ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 21:29, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Let's be perfectly clear about this: I am not responsible for even one of those redirects being turned into an article. What I have done is to provide pictures for the articles after they were started, which is something completely different. Although my personal preference is to deal with books within dedicated articles rather than within articles about their authors, I have no necessary opinion about whether any of these D&D novels are notable. Maybe they are, maybe not. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 23:01, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

The characters should definitely not have their own articles. The books are more in a grey area, but I have no problem with redirecting them back and merging anything new into the target articles. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 00:36, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

In my opinion anyone wanting to turn the articles back to redirects should first establish that the books are definitely not notable. Dialectric does not seem to have done that before making this edit at Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 00:42, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

The WP:ONUS is on the person claiming the subject IS notable to provide third party coverage. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 01:07, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Redirects require consensus, like anything else. The editor who performed the redirect at the article linked to above certainly didn't seek any kind of consensus, which is regrettable. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 01:12, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Redirects to author or series are a reasonable and fairly common solution for unreferenced book stubs. These redirects, along with those for unreferenced music albums, are often done without discussion because the article subject has no apparent claim to notability. I did a quick search for the first few books and found no significant RS coverage. If you know of such coverage, as As TheRedPenOfDoom suggests, feel free to revert. It would be tedious to afd these articles, but if sources don't emerge and we can't agree on a redirect, that may be necessary.Dialectric (talk) 01:44, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Respectfully, I don't think it's desirable to turn any article into a redirect without first checking to see whether there are sources that could be used to establish notability. Which were the articles that you redirected without looking for such sources? I think they at least could be turned back into articles. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk)

Creating articles without references or a claim to notability is also undesirable, and has been discouraged at least since 2012. These articles all date from the last year. The books I did not check were the last few in the Elminster series. I have since checked these, and did not find any significant RS coverage, just personal blogs and forums. I did not redirect Bury Elminster Deep because it has an independent reference. And a side note - the Elminster article also contains summaries of most of these books; these may fit better in the article on the series. Dialectric (talk) 14:47, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

None of these have had any serious expansion or sourcing in the last several months. I'm turning them back into redirects for now. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 20:49, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

I've just reverted my re-redirecting of Aasterinian pending the outcome of this discussion. That article lists a few books as references, but I don't have immediate access to them, so can't verify what kind of coverage of the topic actually exists in them, but can say that much of the article doesn't have footnotes indicating where the information came from. Does this sort of article still have a place here? IMO, they can be better covered with WP:INUNIVERSE writing on other websites like dandwiki.com, can they not? AdventurousSquirrel (talk) 00:48, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

I re-reverted your reversion (or whatever) before I saw this. I'm familiar enough with those sources to say that there's nothing there. Way too much fancruft, and virtually no independent coverage, which is vital for WP:GNG. It's all in-house product info, which is basically WP:ADVERTISING. These problems need to be solved before the article is restored, not just slapped with a ref-improve template and abandoned again. Grayfell (talk) 01:42, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Ha, thanks Grayfell. Do you have an opinion on others like Tamara (Dungeons & Dragons) or Garyx? AdventurousSquirrel (talk) 06:32, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

No prob. I'm pretty sure the two other articles should be redirects as well, and I thought about doing that also, but I didn't want to bulldoze just to make a point. Since you just tagged them there's no great rush. Looking at the history of some of these articles, many of them have already been through AFD and then got restored by (likely the same) IP editor without any new sources or substantial improvements and with no good explanation. This is nasty stuff that goes against WP:CONSENSUS. Has this behavior been brought up somewhere before?

As for the content, if Dragon deities and similar can be brought up to be in better condition, then starting to fork articles based on sources makes a lot more sense. Until then, I don't see it. Looking for sources, Garyx is mentioned once as the name of the god of all dragons in a romance novel series called The Saga of the Steampunk Witches. Other than that, I found bupkis outside of a small number of Wiz/TRS sources and Wikia-derived junk. If that's the level of outside coverage we're looking at, well... yeah. Maybe I'm overlooking something? Tamara is a common enough name that there's more search noise so it's harder to filter, but I still didn't find anything, and just can't imagine there's going to be the kind of depth needed. Articles like Tiamat (Dungeons & Dragons) badly need sources too, but at least that character is significant to the game and some novels, these guys are waaaay too obscure. It these hit AFD they're likely to meet the same fate as Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Verbeeg as just one example. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the Pokemon test days are over. Grayfell (talk) 08:54, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that's the strategy these really need to take - only fork them out when (or if) really necessary. I think there's a perception among some, including the IP perhaps, that when the topic of their affection is being grouped into an article with other related subjects, that it is somehow being relegated to a life of obscurity, buried under the other topics. I think though that the opposite is often true, and in fact their content is actually more likely to be read/reviewed/reworked in the consolidated article. I'm wondering if there's a way to combat this misconception and prevent this sort of backlash from happening over and over again all around WP... Maybe by making sure each subject included in the consolidated article has its own infobox or something (as I've seen in other types of articles)? Perhaps that would make them seem somewhat less obscurified? I think that can create some formatting issues with very short stubs as some of these are, however.

Re: 'this behavior', do you mean behavior specific to this IP? Not that I know of. Edits seem to be mostly pretty constructive as far as I can tell, and (s)he seems to have quite a lot of familiarity with various WP procedures and norms. It's a shared IP, however, so it's maybe not possible to pin down who exactly is doing what. Though it seems likely that there is not a large number of people from this specific company's staff who spend business hours editing D&D and comic book articles. AdventurousSquirrel (talk) 09:47, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Another option is more links to the D&D Wikibook. It even has its own template Template:D&D Wikibook, which is pretty cool. I honestly don't know that much about Wikibooks, and that may not work. It's linked at Index of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition monsters, and it seems like a better choice than having hundreds of articles teetering on the brink of deletion. I also think smaller wikis like Wikia serve as the perfect companion to Wikipedia in situations like this, and I wish more editors took them seriously as an option, but external links aren't viable, obviously. Adding individual infoboxes might help a little, and it could look good, but if editors are ignoring AFD and recreating content anyway, I'm not sure how much good it's going to do. We may end up with both article and detailed lists, which is making the problem even worse.

I've seen at least a couple of edit summaries for restored articles saying something like "I plan to work on this" followed by nothing. I've also left that summary and then forgot about it, but not for something that was deleted. Most of the IP's edits are good, but this isn't cool. Grayfell (talk) 04:43, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Getting past stub class

I just posted a new article on the Geek & Sundry D&D show Critical Role, which was rated by the D&D Wiki Project as stub class. So far, two criterion are listed as not met, referencing and citation, and supporting materials. (A number of others have not yet been evaluated.) However, looking at the criteria page, I don't understand why these criteria are not met. Is there someone who can help me work through the issues and learn how to improve the article? Gamma Liz (talk) 23:29, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

On the face of it, this looks like a well-structured article with citations to references and the amount of content suggests a strong start-class or C-class article. The main problem with the article, the problem that holds it at stub-class, is that it is written based on unreliable sources. To read more about reliable sources, check out the page WP:RS. In short, the sources should secondary in nature, need to be independent of the subject, and need to be in enough depth that they say something substantial about the subject. Looking at the sources in your article, most fail these criteria for reliability. As one example, reference 25, "A CRITTER’S GUIDE TO CRITMAS" is written by show members themselves, making it primary and not independent; thus not an RS. The entry looks like a blog entry, or perhaps a press release; blogs and press releases are not reliable. If you go through all your refs, a few may pass RS criteria. Then the article should be ideally based just on those RS, no more. So the way forward to an improved article is to be critical of sources, only use those that are reliable, and only include content based on those reliable sources. --Mark viking (talk) 02:03, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Primary sources are not unreliable. That's just incorrect. They fail at establishing notability (as secondary sources are needed there to show that those without a personal interest have noted something), and must be used only for objective facts (because analysis would be likely self-promoting). But primary sources such the aforementioned "Critter's Guide to Christmas" is a perfectly acceptable source to establish the fact it is supporting (that the money goes to charity). Also, since secondary sources aren't necessarily independent, being secondary is not always a superior source. See WP:PSTS for more detail. PS, we don't write source titles in all caps, even if the source website uses all caps for its headlines. See WP:MOSREF. oknazevad (talk) 04:27, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I'm happy to correct the all caps. I was under the impression that I should use the title as given on the source page itself. Regarding primary vs. secondary sources, my understanding has been that the article should not be solely based on primary sources, but that they are acceptable to support specific facts (as Oknazevad appears to confirm). I've been looking at other, similar G&S web series articles for guidance (see The Guild and Table Top), and the use of primary sources for things like storyline, ect. appear to be common practice. Regarding notability, once you strip out the G&S, WotC, and fan-made pages, there are still ten completely independent sources (including The Independent and especially Polygon) that support the notability claim. I have been waiting to post the article until something specifically like the recent Polygon article came out. I could reduce the primary sourcing to make the independent sources more visible, but that would necessarily decrease the detail in the article to something more like this. Gamma Liz (talk) 14:48, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

It looks like the article has been upgraded to Start-Class. Thanks for the assistance! Supposedly, there is another major media story coming soon, so hopefully that will improve the RS criterion. Regarding the supporting materials criterion, is this listed as "not met" just because there is no image in the infobox? Is there some formatting missing from the infobox that is causing it to fail the criterion? Many thanks! Gamma Liz (talk) 15:56, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

It is looking much better. 73.168.15.161 (talk) 01:43, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Related AfD

The following AfD discussion may be of interest to members of this project.

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kelek (Dungeons & Dragons) -Ad Orientem (talk) 17:30, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

D&D - now with Gamergate type drama!

See the "Controversy" section added to Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear.[1] 65.126.152.254 (talk) 23:15, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to have been very much controversy. 70.185.194.120 (talk) 13:08, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, bigots whined, no one listened to them, and it blew over. oknazevad (talk) 14:49, 13 June 2016 (UTC)