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. John254 02:37, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Lum the Mad[edit]

Lum the Mad (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

The article is original research with no reliable sources that can be used to verify notability. There is nothing in the article that suggests this person is any more notable than thousands of other site owners, commentators and bloggers who cover the MMORPG subject area. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 04:22, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. As per the comments in the first nomination, this individual and his website were extremely well-known and influential within the early MMO industry. --Elonka 04:24, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Those comments are fine and all, but where are the sources? Unless sources can be provided which support the claims made in the first nom, this article needs to go. As it is, the prose is horribly sloppy, and the lack of sources makes it look like something slapped together by the author for a personal website. If you can provide reliable sources which show the notability, I'm fine with the article being kept. However, it's been in this state since the first nom nearly three years ago, and nothing has changed. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 04:29, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Bringing it to AfD may have the unfortunate affect of leaving it both unchanged and deleted. Which is unfortunate, because there are, according to Google Books[1], at least four books that mention Lum the Mad (ISBN 0596007140, ISBN 0226096262, ISBN 1592730000, ISBN 0262201631) and possibly one book written by Scott Jenning a.k.a. Lum the Mad (ISBN 0471752738). I won't have the available time within seven days to check out these books (possibly through interlibrary loan) and write a decent article. If anyone else does, please feel free to use these resources. It would be a shame to lose this article due to lack of sources, which are clearly available. --Iamunknown 05:03, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • While I agree that it could be unfortunate, the article has been marked since April 2007 as not having any references. That's more than enough time to get books through interlibrary loan. If you can get them and the article is deleted, I'd be happy to have it moved to your userspace where you could bring it up to standards and then move it back to mainspace. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 05:09, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • I haven't really researched this topic, so don't take this as a Keep or Delete !vote. But just as a general point, there is no rule that an article must be referenced and cleaned up by the end of an AFD (with the exception of copyvios and BLP issues). If sources are shown to exist, then we should allow some time for interested editors to fix the article. There is no deadline, after all. (Most of the info in this article is probably true, anyway.) Zagalejo^^^ 05:24, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • FWIW, his name also appears in the index of this book and this book (using Amazon's search book function). Zagalejo^^^ 05:35, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
          • How do you view the index? SharkD (talk) 08:20, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
            • If you click "Search inside", you can usually see the index (although you may need to have an Amazon account). Zagalejo^^^ 19:37, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
            • Oh wait. The index isn't visible for the second book. I think I just typed "Lum the Mad" in the search bar and browsed through the text previews. Zagalejo^^^ 19:41, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • The book Lum the Mad wrote is called Massively Multiplayer Games For Dummies. SharkD (talk) 08:20, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • A search using Google Scholar results in four hits. SharkD (talk) 08:25, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This debate has been added to the list of video game deletions. Someone another (talk) 17:19, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. For those editors above who say that books are available, I'd say go ahead and add listings for those books to the article. I may have access to them as well, but I'll echo what other people have said here, which is that AfD is not something that should be used as a tool for "Hurry and clean up the article right away." If it's obvious that sources exist, and the consensus is that the article should be kept, then tag the article as needing cleanup (which I do agree it obviously needs), and let's move on. There's no urgency involved. See WP:NOTCLEANUP. --Elonka 17:34, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • There hasn't been any urggency at all. It's been three years (almost) since the last AfD, and about 9 months since the ((unreferenced)) tag was added to the article. Surely that's more than enough time to get a book through interlibrary loan. It could be sent the slowest possible method and be shipped around the world in nine months, let alone three years. This article has had more than enough time to be cleaned up, and no one has done anything with it in that time. Again, I'm fine with it being kept if it can actually be shown that this individual is notable, but unless that happens, this article shouldn't be here. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 02:08, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Of course, AFD was totally different back then; nominators didn't demand sources as tenaciously as they do now. And unreferenced tags are generally ineffective. This is probably the first time the article has been seriously challenged. So let's not worry about how much time has passed; let's turn our attention to the potential sources mentioned above. Do those provide enough information to write a decent Wikipedia article? I'm not sure myself, since I can only see previews of those books (and in some cases, only the indexes). But maybe someone else can chime in. Zagalejo^^^ 03:44, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. I think the appropriate factor here is WP:V and this doesn't work with it. Coccyx Bloccyx (talk) 19:37, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - Whether added to the article or not, I am convinced by the above debate that reliable sources exist. User:Krator (t c) 18:42, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. I just completed a major overhaul of the article. I removed some poorly-sourced information, added several new sources (thanks to everyone above that provided the ISBNs), and completely reorganized the rest of it. As a caveat, I freely admit that I work in the online game industry, so my edits could be seen as potentially exhibiting a conflict of interest. I encourage review and if necessary, change, of anything that I did. --Elonka 19:09, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Based on the complete revamp of the article, I withdraw my nomination and support the Keeping of this article. Thank you to those who improved it, whether by editing or providing references. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 21:27, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep the revamp clearly demonstrates the notability of this person and passes WP:BIO easily. The reference to Something Awful on the otherhand is original research and should be removed. RFerreira (talk) 22:07, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Agreed, I went ahead and removed the Something Awful mention. --Elonka 22:26, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Since this item was also posted for review at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard and I had to read the article anyway, I decided to join in here as well. The article ought to be shorter, and some of the information that is not so well-sourced should be removed. Ideally the information in an article about a person should come from what others have written about him, and it's not certain that that's the case here. That could represent a problem of inadequate sources. The article is somewhat like a resume, and for the most part, it reports his opinions without showing how significant others thought his opinions were. The only exception I noticed is the quote from Carless (recently added by Elonka), which to me is the clearest statement of Jennings' importance to be found in a reliable source: "The site and Lum's opinions became very popular, and the Lum site became one of the most respected sources of MMOG news on the Internet." By contrast, Taylor's book quotes six sentences from Jennings but doesn't say anything about his importance in the industry. Even now the lead goes a bit ahead of what the sources say in terms of his importance, but I'm sure it can be tweaked. EdJohnston (talk) 05:19, 6 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep with thanks to Elonka for the rewrite. JavaTenor (talk) 05:25, 6 January 2008 (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.