Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Godawful fan fiction

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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 of the debate was Delete, the ratio of valid keeps to deletes is 1:2. --Deathphoenix 02:57, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Godawful fan fiction

  ATTENTION!

If you came here because you read a message on http://www.godawful.net, please note that this is not a majority vote, but rather a discussion to establish a consensus among Wikipedia editors on whether a page is suitable for this encyclopedia. Wikipedia has policies and guidelines to help us decide this, and deletion decisions are made on the merits of the arguments, not by counting votes.

Nonetheless, you are welcome to participate and express your opinions. Remember to assume good faith on the part of others and to sign your posts on this page by adding ~~~~ at the end.

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Non-notable website. Alexa ranking of 135,274. [1] 6,160 Google hits. [2] NoIdeaNick 05:48, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Delete. Who cares? Non-notable. -Ikkyu2 06:07, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep Godawful is the first notable website on the net that elivered negative views and reviews on fanfiction, it even predates the creation of Fanfiction.net.
  • Delete per nom. Makemi 06:11, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete - while I agree that fanfiction is Godawful, so is their alexa ranking and overall relevancy -- Thesquire (talk - contribs) 06:23, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete as per nom.  (aeropagitica)  08:13, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep Knowing the original sources and the reasoning behind some things, such as "snarking" may be useful for people who do not know what a snark is, and also can reduce "chinese wispers". Kopilo 09:02, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete. A huge, whopping total of 11 sites link to it! Confusing Manifestation 11:58, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete. You know, I don't think people volunteer their stuff to be made laughing stocks of, so surely that's an attack website? --Agamemnon2 13:24, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Many of the members of GAFF post their own works and ideas on GAFF "to be laughed at". Kopilo 10:18, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete as a non-notable website. Also inaccurate, as it implies there's fan-fiction that isn't god-awful. Lord Bob 21:31, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
    • It is Lord Bob's opinion that all fan fiction is God Awful and is not stated in the fan fiction artical on Wikipedia that it is. Kopilo 10:27, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
      • User:Kopilo does not exist, comment was made by User:203.59.2.35 -- Thesquire (talk - contribs) 20:53, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. The site has been noticed by several news publications. I have added the links to the article. SCharon 22:13, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
    • A quick glance shows that the notice in the Guardian and New York Times articles is just that: a notice. It's a list of webpages related to fan fiction and this site is on the list, neither more nor less important than most of the others. Merely 'being in the paper', in the opinion of many, does not confer notability. Lord Bob 23:02, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete and redirect to Fan fiction. Radiant_>|< 22:46, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. It's a notable website within the fanfiction and livejournal community. It predates fanfiction.net itself, is the father of fanfiction snarking (once a niche in the Internet, now a common occurrence), and has been mentioned in numerous publications both on and off the web. Wikipedia has articles on communities that were arguably inspired by, or are outright 'spin-offs' from GAFF. It fully deserves an article of its own. There is no logical reason to delete it - not being personally interested in the subject matter is not a logical reason. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.177.168.160 (talk • contribs)
  • Keep. It's the oldest, if not the most infamous, website of it's kind. —the preceding unsigned comment is by Godawful Fan Fiction (talk • contribs) 18:36, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. It is a notable website and a rather balanced article, and there is no real reason why it should be deleted. —the preceding unsigned comment is by 64.42.105.124 (talk • contribs) 19:49, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. The "attack" concept is misguided. The point of the site is to allow people healthy release so that when they do give criticism to authors, it's constructive rather than destructive. Telling authors that their work is being attacked on GAFF is frowned upon by the community. In addition, it has moved more into a "general" discussion forum for other things that could be godawful (websites, movies, novels, popular trends, etc.).Spotts1701 03:12, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. Whatever else you think of it, GAFF IS an important piece of the history of 'fan fiction', as it was one of the first places of its kind. It deserves a place here. Ghost 05:29, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. If you're going after "non-notable" articles, there are far more to start with than this one. Google and Alexa ratings are not the sole determination of whether something is worthy of study, especially when you don't use the right search queries for the job. As per your own guidelines, "There is currently no consensus about what degree of recognition is required to justify a unique article being created in Wikipedia [...] Lack of fame is not the same as vanity." Aside from that, Squire seems to have a grudge. —the preceding unsigned comment is by 72.139.233.217 (talk • contribs) 11:54, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Note on Meatpuppet Attack: their forums are having a mild discussion on the deletion merits of this article (free registration required), which explains where all these anonymous and new chappies are coming from. While this doesn't seem to be calling out the vote, it is clearly, intentionally or not, acting as a magnet to draw keep votes from members of their forum. Also, I get called an idiot. Hee hee. Lord Bob 18:54, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Keep You'd be surprised the kind of influence that site has had - both negative and positive - in a large section of the fanfiction subculture, notably and especially on the largest fanfiction archive on the net, FanFiction.Net itself. With thousands of members, though, most of whom have at least a cursory familiarity with fanfiction (if not actively reading and/or writing it on a frequent basis), that should not be surprising. Plus: it was actually reviewed in the New York Times (positively, I might add), as part of an article on fanfiction. A special mention in an article from the New York Times is not "merely being in the paper", I'd say.

Lord Bob: you were labeled by one user as that precisely because you are letting your bias seep in - and rather obviously, at that, as it ("Also inaccurate, as it implies there's fan-fiction that isn't god-awful") was clearly an opinion, not fact. "Non-notable" is certainly up for debate, it seems, but "all fanfiction is godawful" is PURE opinion. Additionally, had you read the entire page in question, you would had noticed that it does not "imply" anything about the quality of fanfiction in general, it merely states that Godawful Fan Fiction was the first site dedicated to mocking badly-written fan fiction, and is a source of controversy in the fanfiction community. As such, I'd say it deserves a mention, if obscure comic books (such as Zodiac P.I.) deserve one. There are plenty of things that are less "notable" than the subject of this entry, and it seems to be quite balanced and neutral. Again - I vote keep, at least for now. Runa27

It was a joke. If I thought that all fanfiction sites should be deleted, I'd have put fanfiction.net up long ago. While stating such an opinion in serious form would be...stating an opinion...this was an obvious opportunity for light-hearted humour. I have in fact written bad Star Wars fan fiction in the past, for what that's worth. For that matter, even if I did hate all fanfiction, I'm not stupid enough to think that's a deletion criteria. I think Scientology is stupid and I wouldn't vote to delete that. Lord Bob 00:57, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. That Alexa ranking is actually not that bad and there's something to be said for being that old a website on this topic. Article is not horrible. The meatpuppets are also unusually articulate and on topic :) - Haukur 02:21, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete as godawful. Influenced by sock/meatpuppets. Stifle 16:14, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keepas I've seen to many people with personal vendetas against certain Websites (IE: Stardestroyer.net) force articles into deleetion simply on the grounds of not liking either their methodologies, or policies. It is utterly assinine, and is a behavior that is being repeated here. Majin Gojira 21:54, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
    • I know that I personally only nominated this page because wikipedia is not a web directory. I certainly don't have any agenda against fan fiction. The only question at hand is whether and internet forum with 3,200 members deserves inclusion in an encyclopedia. If there were a consensus in favor of including such sites, I would not have nominated the article. I wouldn't have any problem with the page being turned into a redirect to fan fiction, as per Radiant. I also wouldn't have a problem with the page being merged into another article, if anything worthy of mention can be found. The problem is that almost all of the information, when sourced, is sourced to godawful fan fiction itself. I think UncleG summed it up pretty well in a recent comment on the talk page of WP:WEB. See Wikipedia talk:Notability (websites)#Alexa rankings. NoIdeaNick 21:11, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep As has been noted, the website is well-known and has been around for quite some time. -GG Crono
    • If Cassandra_Claire gets one, then hell, why not "an internet forum with 3,200 members?"
  • I've reconsidered this a bit, and while I'm not sure that an article on this subject has a place in Wikipedia, after considering what else is out there in Wikipedia I'd rather take the cautious route and keep the article, at least for now. I know that people want to remove "cruft" from Wikipedia, but if there are enough people who find the article useful, we ought to be careful about our decision. And plus, I'd think that if there can be an article on each and every Pokemon, then we can be pretty liberal about what we let in Wikipedia, as long as the articles are well sourced and not vanity. NoIdeaNick 22:28, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Keep Most of the reasons given against it are assinine and even goes against Wiki's standards. Last time I checked, googling and checking hits wasn't the sole determining factor of keeping pages, not to mention the senriority and overall influence it's had on large fanfiction communities. Claude 00:30, 31 January 2006 (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.