Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Death Eater

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. (non-admin closure) – AssumeGoodWraith (talk | contribs) 11:21, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Death Eater

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

This article is entirely a product of WP:FANCRUFT. It's mostly unsourced with no signs of notability. Of its 19 sources, 11 are from the Harry Potter books, 3 are from the official site of the author, 3 are from fansites of dubious reliability. The remaining 2 are about Lucius Malfoy and only tangentially about the organization. Its lede can be moved to Fictional universe of Harry Potter and the article redirected there. Characters and their redirects can be moved/retargeted to List of Harry Potter characters. Isabelle ^🔔 16:17, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. Isabelle ^🔔 16:17, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science fiction and fantasy-related deletion discussions. Isabelle ^🔔 16:17, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. Isabelle ^🔔 16:17, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Popular culture-related deletion discussions. Isabelle ^🔔 16:17, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Merge/Redirect agree with the merge as discussed. Oaktree b (talk) 16:20, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 16:25, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Merge or redirect to List of Harry Potter characters as an WP:ATD. —hueman1 (talk • contributions) 18:20, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
merge with List of Harry Potter characters Star Mississippi 19:16, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: If the result is merge, some characters would have to go to List of supporting Harry Potter characters. —El Millo (talk) 20:52, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and cleanup, as the topic is notable: [1], [2] (well....), [3], [4]. I'm sure there are better sources overall, but Scholar should be more exhaustively searched before we give up on this topic as NN. Jclemens (talk) 05:12, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect per above, given that the article has zero assertion of significance, and having just spend over half an hour finding and presenting an analysis of sources in my BEFORE (keep, btw) comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jacquotte Delahaye, I am not very interested in checking the WP:GOOGLEHITS User:Jclemens presented above. If there is something useful in them, please provide an analysis and quotations, otherwise, it's, well, GOOGLEHITS. If someone can't be bothered to discuss the sources they found, in my experience, this too often means there is nothing substantial in them. And by all means, prove me wrong and tell us how those sources contain SIGCOV that proves the notability of the topic, ping me and I'll gladly revise my vote. PS. Few months ago we merged this list to the general list of HP characters on pl wiki. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:57, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- WP:GOOGLEHITS is about quantity of search results, and has nothing to do with my findings, which are all from Google Scholar. In my experience, if an editor can't be bothered to click on any of four grossly curated links, but can spend time complaining about the lack of commentary thereon, they demonstrate an unwillingness to expend effort to comprehend the topic's potential notability and their opinion should be weighed accordingly. Jclemens (talk) 18:25, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  - Your first link is to page 113 of A Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation, the first page of the chapter "The Nuances of Mastering Death: Murder, Capital Punishment, and Assisted Suicide" by Kalie Caetano, where the collocation "Death Eater(s)" does not appear. Your second link is to the essay "An Analysis of Presupposition Used in Novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" from the Faculty of Language and Arts at the State University of Padang, where the collocation "Death Eater(s)" appears as part of the quoted line If it was a Death Eater we would be dead by now. from the novel and the authors' further analysis that this means that it is not in fact a Death Eater (an example of a counterfactual presupposition). Your third link is to page 213 of A Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation (i.e. the same book as the first link), a page that I am unable to access via Google Books but the search function tells me that the collocation "Death Eater(s)" appears in the sentence Even though, later, as Voldemort he is surrounded by his Death Eater "friends," they aren't truly friends. Your fourth link is to the student publication Harry Potter and the Meaning of Death by Harrison D. Brown at Gettysburg College, where the collocation "Death Eater(s)" appears eight times (none of which are in the abstract or keywords): In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, we learn that Lord Voldemort went to kill Lily and James who had been fighting against him and his evil followers, the Death Eaters., Unfortunately, at the end of the book, a battle takes place in the Ministry between Voldemort's forces called the Death Eaters and the Order, along with Harry and some friends. Sirius battles his cousin, a Death Eater named Bellatrix, around a magical "veil" that is supposed to separate our world from the "beyond"., Harry and Dumbledore are arriving back at Hogwarts, where Death Eaters are attacking the school. They land on the Astronomy tower, only to be met by Death Eaters and Harry's enemy Draco Malfoy. Harry is paralyzed by Dumbledore and made invisible by his Invisibility Cloak so that the Death Eaters cannot see him. Malfoy reveals he has been trying to kill Dumbledore all school year, with various methods and having no success. Suddenly Professor Snape, a friend of Dumbledore's and a former Death Eater, arrives., and Dobby is killed while saving Harry and his friends from a Death Eater's house, a final act of friendship and sacrifice for Harry. Methinks Piotrus was right to be skeptical. TompaDompa (talk) 21:02, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Sadly, experience with such google hit 'keep' votes does warrant it. And certain users do like to repeat this tactic too, which is hardly best practices. Thank you for confirming my suspicions. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:37, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I'll proudly keep repeating it any time I see a nomination that lacks a sensible BEFORE effort, as judged by the nom not mentioning any efforts and me finding News or Scholar links worth reviewing. It's me donating my time to do the nominator's job. Jclemens (talk) 08:17, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep but nuke most of the in-universe content. Notability of this group is shown in these sources, which are mostly full chapters focused on Death Eaters:

"Death Eaters and Dark Wizards: Terror and Counterterror" in The Politics of Harry Potter, pp 95-115: "Could there be a more archetypal terrorist1 organization than the Death Eaters? Their masks, their love of theatrics, their choice of targets and tactics with powerful emotional impact, and their ability to hide in plain sight— in many ways they are the quintessential 'terrorist group' as it has been constructed in the popular collective consciousness, and they similarly bedevil the “legitimate” power of the Ministry to stop them."
"Crime : "Or dear Bellatrix, who likes to play with her food before she eats it" : why we need Death Eaters" in The sociology of Harry Potter : 22 enchanting essays on the wizarding world
"Death Eaters and Discrimination" in Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy : Hogwarts for Muggles
"Voldemort, Death Eaters, dementors, and the dark arts : a contemporary theology of spiritual perversion in the Harry Potter stories" in The lure of the dark side : Satan and western demonology in popular culture

Also, to extract from the Jclemens's sources above:

A Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation index has Death Eaters on pages 77–78, 103, 110, 203, 230-232 (the multi-page ones are more likely significant coverage)
Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays index has Death Eaters on pages 2, 18-19, 79-80, 86, 143-145, 149-50, 153-54 (multi-page items likely have significant coverage)

Thanks, Erik (talk | contrib) ^{(ping me)} 13:16, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Erik Your first reference is not bad, but did you check if the others contain any SIGCOV? Have you seen critique of sources by User:TompaDompa above? It was posted, I think, after your list. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:39, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I was not able to check directly because of not being able to view the pages, but what I found specifically had "Death Eaters" in the chapter title, which I think indicates a strong likelihood of covering them. As for Jclemens's sources, I do not find the thesis/student-paper sources to be reliable, but the actual books he named, I looked and found Death Eaters on their index pages but could not see the actual pages. Like I mentioned, multi-page mentions tend to mean more detailed discussion, though not always. Regardless, if the article is kept, it needs to be cut down to a simple stub. The degree of in-universe content is atrocious. Erik (talk | contrib) ^{(ping me)} 13:18, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep This article is the result of months of discussions within the (former?) Harry Potter Portal years ago, since there existed individual articles on almost every single Death Eater (including Lucius Malfoy, Peter Pettigrew, Igor Karkaroff, etc.) Per Wikipedia:Notability, "articles on minor characters in a work of fiction may be merged into a "list of minor characters in ..."" In this case, since the List of supporting Harry Potter characters is/was already long enough to get entries from an entire group like the Death Eaters, it was decided to merge such individual articles into the already existing "Death Eater" article that just covered the topic on the organization. Certainly, the article has to be written in an encyclopedic way, but not deleted. --LoЯd ۞pεth 20:28, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Lord Opeth That's a fair assessment, the question is, can it be written in an encyclopedic way at all, and if so, will this be done now, and if not, should this be temporarily redirected until this happens? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:40, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus it can definitely be written in an encyclopedic way. Two key sections are important here: Creation/Development, and Reception/Impact in popular culture. We can start by creating the Reception section, incorporating some of the stuff other editors have listed and looking for more (it will obviously need to have the Expansion tag at the beginning of the section). --LoЯd ۞pεth 15:51, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Lord Opeth The problem is that those section still don't exist, do they? Until they do, a SOFTDELETE redirect, getting read of the in-universe fancruft, is IMHO preferable. As I said, I'd be happy to revise my vote to a possible keep if someone starts fixing the article (by adding such sections). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:45, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
WP:ARTN states, "Notability is a property of a subject and not of a Wikipedia article. If the subject has not been covered outside of Wikipedia, no amount of improvements to the Wikipedia content will suddenly make the subject notable. Conversely, if the source material exists, even very poor writing and referencing within a Wikipedia article will not decrease the subject's notability."

Also, WP:SOFTDELETE states, "There is consensus among the community that problematic or likely-problematic articles with an appropriate redirection target may be blanked and redirected by any editor if there are no objections. This similarly applies to deletion nominations as well; if no editor suggests that the corresponding article should be kept, then redirection is an option." There are numerous editors advocating to keep. Erik (talk | contrib) ^{(ping me)} 14:40, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, trim, improve. I think with the sources found it would be possible to write at least a paragraph of analysis, e.g. based on the quote from Death Eaters and Dark Wizards: Terror and Counterterror. Or in Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays preview shows things like "Rowling inscribes the ideology of Voldemort in different ways: using the words of Karl Marx...the Death Eaters, are dressed alternatively in feudal, fascist, and Thatcherite ideologies..." linking them to both the "aristocratic elite" and "the welfare state" (p. 132) "The name Death Eaters suggests the swallowing of darkness, of lies - chiefly in order to preserve their parasitic leader." (p. 80) "Horrible as they are, the Death Eaters are eerily childish with Voldemort,... All those who embrace falsehood in these books evidence some form of arrested development..." (p. 86). Daranios (talk) 12:04, February 22, 2022 (UTC)
Keep per the suggestions of @Jclemens:, @Erik:, @Lord Opeth:, and @Daranios:. --Rtkat3 (talk) 23:56, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep (and trim) per the suggestions above. /Julle (talk) 20:24, 23 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Per others and WP:NEXIST, it seems like an encyclopedic article can come of it based on the provided sources in this discussion. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 20:35, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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.