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. All delete opinions were prior to the article improvement. GRBerry 16:53, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Elephant joke[edit]

Elephant joke (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Unencyclopedic, merely a list of jokes. If it should exist at all, then it should be at Wikisource or elsewhere. The first AfD was speedy closed as no deletion rationale was given. Ezeu 21:44, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination withdrawn. It is a substantially different article now. --Ezeu 17:35, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete, per nom. This is simply an index or directory of elephant jokes. Nothing in the article demonstrates encyclopedic value. We don't need umbrella-articles for every dime-a-dozen topic that has been the subject matter for jokes. Agent 86 22:06, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per Agent86. There's nothing encyclopediaic here, apart from maybe the joke by Groucho Marx - but that should go on Groucho Marx's page...or Wikiquote:Groucho Marx or maybe even Wikiquote:Elephant. --Montchav 23:38, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • The previous AFD was pretty dodgy. Ignorable even. --Montchav 23:39, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• There is, in fact, quite a lot of serious documentation and discussion of elephant jokes in books and in journal articles, in particular of the elephant joke craze that began in the United States in 1963. (I've already cited one such article in Folklore of the United States#Further reading. There are plenty of others.) The problem with this article is that it contains almost none of this discussion, cites no sources, and relies mainly upon original research analyses by Wikipedia editors of the actual jokes themselves. That problem is a matter of cleanup, not deletion, however. Coincidentally, I've just improved shaggy dog story, which was at one point just as bad as this article currently is. I'm rather pressed for time at the moment, but I'll have a go at improving this article too.

  To see that, per Wikipedia:Deletion policy, there's scope for more than a stub article here and that fixing this is simply a matter of modifying the article to use what sources provide, see the aforementioned journal article, pages 142 et seq. of ISBN 0765806592, pages 59 et seq. of ISBN 0395572266, pages 116 et seq. of ISBN 0813013968, the whole of chapter 2 of ISBN 0813117747, pages 23–25 of ISBN 0252027868, and page 4 of ISBN 0813918111. Feel free to use these sources, and the many others that exist on the subject, to improve the article before I have the opportunity to do so. Keep. Uncle G 19:04, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, largely per Uncle G. WMMartin 19:44, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

@Keep, Uncle G has transformed this into a brilliant article. Paul B 13:34, 16 January 2007 (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.