Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herb usage 2

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 delete. Consensus (taking into account also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herb usage) identifies this collection of articles as unverifiable content forks and indiscriminate collections of information. Sandstein 05:40, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Herb (preparation) and others[edit]

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A WP:WALL of many articles created by one editor (Cottonball (talk · contribs)) that is an enumeration of different uses and methods of plant and "materia medica" uses. A previous AfD (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herb usage) excluded these articles and left the undesirable situation where we deleted Herb (General Usage Part 2) and Herb (General Usage Part 3), but not Herb (General Usage Part 1). In the view of many the last AfD, these articles aren't encyclopedic. See the full list below. Rkitko ^(talk) 21:52, 12 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Full list of articles in this discussion:

Keep all, but combine and and retitle. To: Herb use in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and similar. This is a specific topic, and TCM is an authentic tradition with an large literature, some of it in English. It would be good to see traditional Chinese sources added, in English if possible. The various part 1, 2, ,3, 4 etc. should of course be combined. I think that to avoid cultural bias it should be possible to write an article on each of the medicinal preparations independent from the article on the plant of origin, but certainly I'm not equipped to do it. In the meantime, this ids a suitable summary. DGG ( talk ) 05:47, 13 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I still don't see how these lists, even if combined, would be encyclopedic. Would we allow a list like this comprised entirely of transliterations of traditional herbs used in some remote tribal medicine, all of which is meaningless because we don't know the source plant species often because references are vague. Compounding the problem here, we have lists largely from an unknown source, most of which I assume the editor transliterated with the tools and links included the certainly deletable Herb (Translation of herb names), which includes online translators. WP:NOTDIR #7 seems to apply here. I have nothing against articles that summarize traditional Chinese medicine, materia medica, or anything else that uses many examples to explain what the article topic is, but an exhaustive list the collective above doesn't seem to belong on Wikipedia. --Rkitko ^(talk) 16:24, 13 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: To survive this, the lists must be combined and retitled per DGG here and DHowell in the previous AfD as necessary. This is a bare minimum. TCM is not "some remote tribal medicine" but still widely used in China today, so the analogy is not so apt. This needs sourcing, though. Most of these stuff can probably be sourced to China's official Pharmacoepia, but I can't find a reliable online copy for that. Tim Song (talk) 17:21, 13 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Well, these were originally content forks of the already thorough Chinese herbology and Traditional Chinese medicine, of which the former already includes a pretty extensive list. Any work from new references like you mention would likely have to start from scratch since these lists, as I noted above, are probably just transliterations from an unknown source. --Rkitko ^(talk) 17:39, 13 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - I'm now persuaded that any work on this topic is better off starting from scratch than this unsourced mess. My review of the Latin names also convinced me that at least some of them are grammatically questionable, calling into further doubt the usefulness of the articles. Delete per nom and RDBury. Tim Song (talk) 22:11, 19 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Details of Tim Song (talk)'s analysis of the Latin, for those who want to read it, hatted by the author.

In TCM Materia Medica (Plant Part 1), a line reads:

wàn nián hāo	万年蒿	Russian wormwood	Herba Artemisiae Sacrori

Given the context, Artemisiae is clearly feminine genitive, but -i is never a feminine genitive ending (it's a genitive ending for masculine and neuter). Further investigations revealed that the plant's name was Artemisia Sacrorum[1], apparently coming from the adjective sacer, sacra, sacrum, "sacred", used substantively as a noun. This implies that Sacrorum is genitive plural. However, this would mean that the proper way to put the plant in genitive is Artemisiae sacrorum, with the second word unchanged. This appears to be the work of an amateur Latin student blindly adding a genitive ending to every single word in the plant name, oblivious to the meaning of the original form. The result is that the list is totally useless. Tim Song (talk) 22:11, 19 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete: Most of the articles seem to be simply lists of herbs and their names in English Chinese and Latin. The Chinese herbology article already has lists totaling 126 herbs. I don't think Wikipedia should be a complete compendium of every possible traditional medicine. The preparation article seems to be another list, but this time methods of preparation. The general usage is yet another list but at least this has what each herb is purported to do. Perhaps some of this should be added to the Chinese herbology article but there is no reason to have a separate article for it. Finally, the translation article is simply a list of links to resources help translate Chinese; it has nothing to do with the herbs other than the title. Basically, I couldn't find anything in the articles that would pass WP:IINFO.--RDBury (talk) 05:02, 14 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Go ahead, Web is wide and some other database will surely publish these important lists, sooner or later. Kokot.kokotisko (talk) 11:21, 20 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and do what DGG says. It has EV, just needs work. Thank god there are some refs. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 01:53, 15 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, combine and retitle per DGG. - Draeco (talk) 02:56, 16 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, JForget 22:23, 19 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, or delete if you want to make WP worse. Of course, the topic broached by these articles is so huge and important that it requires a lot of work to be good. At this point, whole group of articles it's just a stub and it makes no sense trying to decide things such as merges and titles so early. Kokot.kokotisko (talk) 11:21, 20 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete The subject is perfectly notable, which is why we already have articles on Traditional Chinese medicine and more importantly Chinese herbology, as well as various already existing daughter articles of those. I don't see the need to create an entire set of redundant articles when we already have some perfectly usable articles, which themselves are actually titled and organized correctly, rather than this mess. This isn't an indictment of TCM, but rather on this extensive, and poorly executed, set of articles, which are entirely redundant with existing articles. Expand the existing articles, create properly titled and organized daughter articles as needed; there's lots that can be done, but this entire set of articles probably needs to go. --Jayron32 03:09, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I wanted to close this but found it a hard one. The topic is indeed relevant but separate articles in their present state are a borderline case of IINFO. Several articles on the topic already exist and this info could somehow be incorporated. A consensus at the moment is that the articles should not stay in this shape. I'm somewhere between delete and redirect to Traditional Chinese medicine for all of them. Will do one of those in some time, if the nom stays open. --Tone 20:29, 26 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Tone 20:29, 26 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete and Transwiki to Wiktionary Wikipedia is not a Dictionary entry.--Enyroad32 (talk) 07:54, 1 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Cunard (talk) 08:23, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Relisting comment: I have relisted this AfD because save for a comment by a new user, there has been little discussion after Tone's relist. The lack of participation may have been due to a relisting that occurred at 20:29 (UTC), which is three-and-a-half hours before new AfDs are posted on the next day's log page.
If any admin would like to override this non-admin relist and close this AfD, I have no objections in them doing so. Cunard (talk) 08:23, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Awful. Violates several strands of WP:NOT, such as not a dictionary and not a how-to. Furthermore, the "Latin Names" are meaningless - they're mangled versions of the actual species name, with Herba set in front - this has nothing to do with any identification scheme ever used in Latin, and is pure original research, and, furthermore, makes it absolutely uselesss for the forbidden-on-Wikipedia dictionary use which is the only point of these articles. This makes it unsuitable even for transwiki. Shoemaker's Holiday ^{Over 210 FCs served} 15:08, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: largely unsourced dumps of WP:IINFO. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 15:19, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I don't want to say merge here because there is a whole lot of data between the pages that I don't forsee being merged into one article necessarily. It's a whole lot of information on Traditional Chinese Medicine - valiant effort, but this is probably better relegated to somebody's web page. --Dennis The Tiger (Rawr and stuff) 15:46, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect and combine per DGG.--JohnnyB256 (talk) 15:52, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per Dennisthetiger and Shoemaker's Holiady. The "latin names" are messed up, the information indiscriminate, the articles poorly named, gross violation of WP:HOWTO. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Many otters • One bat • One hammer)} 16:54, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

all of which are excellent reasons for improving this series of articles, but completely irrelevant to deleting it. DGG ( talk ) 19:00, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Per WP:NOT, especially WP:IINFO. Unencyclopedic. It would be great for this AfD to be closed with a result other than "no consensus", so to that end, I'll say that I'd be OK with merging everything together, with significant trimming and condensing, and redirecting the individual articles, assuming someone is willing to take on that task. But my strong first preference is deletion. Yilloslime ^T_C 20:17, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Unsourced. Indiscriminate. Inaccurate (with regard to the "Latin names"). Already partially deleted (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herb usage). Let's get this over with. Zetawoof_(ζ) 20:35, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Indiscriminate, unsourced, probably inaccurate and totally redundant. Verbal chat 10:48, 5 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete A huge, sprawling content fork, with organization and naming which we should be avoiding like the plague. Mangoe (talk) 13:25, 5 October 2009 (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.