Talk:Swish (slang)/Archive 1

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 keep (closed by SimonP). --Muchness (talk) 21:01, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Deletion controversy

From VfD:

Wikipedia is not a dictionary. If it was then this page would say: To move with a hissing or whistling sound, as a whip; to rustle; as silk; to cause to make a swishing sound; to strike or cut with a swishing sound; to whip with a rod; a sharp whistling or rustling sound: the swish of scythes' a movement making such a sound, a rod used for flogging; a stroke made with such a rod; fashionable and perhaps lastly neologism: effeminate, used as a disparaging term for a homosexual man. Mintguy (T) 21:56, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• Keep. Not a definition or even a stub. Hyacinth 22:16, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC) ?
  • As you are the author, that's not suprising, but what is your argument for retention within Wikipedia's guidelines. Mintguy (T)
    • Comment: First, I am still editing the article. Secondly, as of yet I see no arguments to refute and am letting the page speak for itself. Hyacinth 22:28, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
• Comment: No vote (yet), because I want to see where Hyacinth is going with this before making a decision. It *is* clear from the page history that Swish was (and still is) a work in progress by Hyacinth over the past couple of hours, before Mintguy listed it on VfD. The subject at hand is a real phenomena, and "swish" in this context is by no means a neologism, having been in widespread use for decades, at the very least.

However, I do think the burden is on Hyacinth to justify why the material covered here deserves an article of its own, when it seems to be covered already in Effeminacy, camp, and drag. As I have always understood the word, "to Swish" is a synonym for "to Flame," that is, to behave in an outrageously stereotypical homosexual male fashion. I would like Hyacinth to clearly show where this material differentiates from what is already here on the subject. If there is't a clear distinction here, then Swish needs to be a merge & redirect to one of the other articles on the same subject. Kevyn 23:33, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• • Comment: Given a majority of votes for deltion I would advise merging the information with Camp, as indicated by Talk:Camp. Hyacinth 23:39, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
    • Hyacinth, we haven't reached that point yet, with only 3 votes so far: one one vote in favour (Mintguy), one against (you), and one undecided (me). It's a little premature to be talking about what the majority of votes will be. Kevyn 23:50, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
      • Granted. For now I would recommend making a comparison with other articles. Butch and Femme is not a disambig for masculine and feminine, as one could argue for given the superficial exact resemblance, while masculine itself is a disambiguation and masculinity and feminity both redirect to gender role. Effeminacy is also covered in Classical definition of effeminacy. There is no article at all for the ideal which replaced swish, clone, which is a disambiguation. I created the disambiguation macho while writing swish... Hyacinth 00:01, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
• Delete. Still a dictionary definition IMO, and I can't see how it's going to change. The article is about the word and its meanings, and that's a dicdef IMO. If there was to be an article it would be swishness or something like that, but I don't think that's a good topic either. And, just BTW, in the Australian English I speak swish has a completely different meaning that hasn't even been mentioned yet. I'm open to changing my vote if a case can be made and almost made this a comment, but decided on the vote (obviously). Andrewa 23:59, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Question: Is the article currently dictionary-like (dictionaryic?)? I think it would be rejected on wiktionary as too encyclopedic. Hyacinth 00:07, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
• Keep and/or merge-delete to Gay slang or Gay culture. I don't see anything wrong with this entry as it stands, except that it's hard for people to connect the title with the contents. If someone wants to see a discussion of the pre-Stonewall culture, I'm pretty sure they're not going to look for "swish," and I don't know about all the people watching basketball in non-English countries looking up "swish" and finding this. We can keep it and ask the author, and any interested folks, to consider a move to a topic entry that will be more obvious. Geogre 00:16, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
• A pretty swishy article I would say. Certainly it shouldn't be kept under "Swish", but it might usefully be merged somewhere else. I'll make a formal vote when I see a little more where it ends up. Hayford Peirce 00:29, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
• Keep in present form (as of 19:55, 13 Aug 2004). I think. Don't know enough about gay culture to know whether how it should be coordinated with other articles. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:26, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Comment. What exactly is so hard about composing a first draft of an article in one's user space and not revealing it to the world until it has at least reached a good solid chrysalis stage? It seems to me that people make things hard on themselves by posting embryonic or larval articles. If you're planning to write more within the next day or so, why not wait until you've written it? Take a look at User:Acegikmo1's article Hanscom Air Force Base, will you? Six major sections, three photographs, a logo, 53 kilobytes long on first appearance in Special:Newpages. I don't see anyone calling that article a dicdef. I was strongly, strongly tempted to put a {{stub}} tag on it just to see what would happen... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:26, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Isn't there already a "work in progress" meta-tag? My vote is to keep or at least merge; either way, swish should be a disambig with the current page being moved to swish (slang) or swishiness or something less ambiguous. -Sean Curtin 04:52, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Isn't this a collaborative effort? Edit yourself. Hyacinth 05:36, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Let me try and make myself clearer. A frequent pattern I see here is that, within less than 48 hours,

1. User creates a new page with a couple of sentences and no {{stub}} notice or any other indication of future intentions
2. Page gets listed on VfD as dicdef or substub
3. Original user gets around to adding the three or four paragraphs he probably had in mind from the beginning.
4. Unnecessary weeklong VfD discussion has been launched, and the article is undergoing contentious scrutiny by people with no expertise in the topic, and griping about trigger-happy deletionists and guessing about whether the article will grow.

And the only real reason for this is that the initial page was short and it could all have been avoided if the author had waited to assemble a half-dozen paragraphs before creating the article.

I think the current article is fine, which is why I voted to keep. I'm not editing it collaboratively, as I have little relevant to add to it. I'm just saying that I think if you had simply waited until you had written the four or five paragraphs that are there now, this article wouldn't be up for VfD. Serious question, why did you put the original article up in its short form? Were you expecting to add more immediately and got distracted? Did you sort of want to put claim markers on the territory? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 12:10, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• Comment: Dpbsmith lays out a real problem. I believe the burden should go in the other direction. Those of us who pay attention to Special:Newpages or VfD are generally more experienced than the user in the example above. We exercise judgement by waiting a while before nominating an article. Reminder: The article should only be nominated for VfD if it has no potential to ever become more than a dicdef. Rossami 12:37, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I beg you pardon? I'm a veteran user. I've been a Wikipedia editor for 2 years. I nominated this article because I thought the content was a dictionary definition (and not the immediately obvious definition at that), and was unlikely be expanded beyond that. I opened page thinking it might possibly be about the curtain rail company, but found out that it was about an obscure slang use of the word that appeared to be a neologism given the references cited were from 1998 and that I'd never heard of and was proably better off in an article about a concept rather than a word. Now I guess I was wrong in the first case as its origin is older than I believed. Mintguy (T)

• Apologies. Dpbsmith and I got into a discussion of a general rule about how new pages are created and what leeway they should be granted before getting nominated for consideration on this page. We should not have distracted the discussion of this particular deletion nomination. Rossami

end moved discussion

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.