Talk:Degenatron

Comment

Before you stick all sorts of deletion crap all over this page for not having sources, consider this, I got all the information from playing the game myself. How do I cite that? Or, as far as that goes, how do you cite anything besides another website on Wikipedia? Daniel Christensen (talk) 15:40, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

See WP:RS#Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources for sources. Primary sources can be used to extract basic facts, but are not reliable for any interpretation or conclusion. Note however the comment below. --Amalthea^Talk 18:05, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

If you are going to stick deletion suggestions on here for lack of "general notability," then reconsider because I think that Grand Theft Auto contains some awesome parodies, as well as other good content, which is often overlooked. Daniel Christensen (talk) 15:42, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Which, I'm afraid, doesn't matter. Yes the GTA series is great fun. Yes, there's lots of interesting details. But we're building an encyclopaedia here, and there needs to be a guideline to define which topics should be included, and which topics shouldn't – if we make this a free for all then we are very quickly swamped by countless trivial biographies, bands, games, tv-shows, buildings, songs, items in games, fictional people in tv shows, and so on, which would make this encyclopaedia unmaintainable in no time.
Two of our basic policies for article content that apply here are WP:VERIFIABILITY and WP:ORIGINAL RESEARCH, and our inclusion guideline is defined at WP:NOTABILITY. At the moment, this article doesn't cite any relieable third-party sources for its interpretations. E.g., you say the topic "parodies an Atari 2600", probably because you find it obvious. Again, imagine if we allowed that kind of verifiability: all controversial articles would be filled with opinions and unverifiable claims in no time, and the usefulness and reliability of this encyclopaedia would be immensly reduced. Creationists, for example, find it obvious that evolution is bogus and would tear all related articles apart.
To prevent that and worse, we have to demand that all facts in articles must be verifiable in reliable sources, and that all topics are notable, i.e. "recieved significant coverage in reliable third-party sources".
I do not find a single reliable source covering the topic at hand at all, not to speak of "in-depth coverage", so it shouldn't have an article here. Full stop. In fact, it seems so trivial to me that I also wouldn't mention it at any of the GTA main articles, but that can be discussed at the respective talk page. We do not strive to include everything here.
You might want to have a look at the Degenatron at the GTA wikia. If you want to build in-depth coverage of GTA, that's the place to go.
I hope that helps. I'm grateful for your contributions, Wikipedia depends on people who want to build articles about topics that are important to them, but please consider this before you create any more articles, else I'm afraid that your efforts will be wasted. Cheers, Amalthea^Talk 18:05, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I added a third party citation Daniel Christensen (talk) 19:09, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

At the bottom of the page you used as a citation, it says "The Wikipedia article included on this page..." I hope it's obvious why we can't use that as a reference. Pagrashtak 19:31, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

... which is a perfect example why we must only use reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy: This one source you added stated that it got its content from Wikipedia, there are countless out there that don't and have repeated unsourced opinions that were posted here, which we in turn used as references to make some facts. E.g., search for Search for "Sundar Chakravarthy" "Julianne Moore". Someone started the rumor that those two were married, I think at imdb, it was picked up by us in January 2005, no one challanged that fact since it was on loads of (unreliable!) biographies on the internet, until she went on TV this September to say that "Wikipedia claims I was married to some guy I've never heard of". Great press, that was.
Imdb is not a reliable source, although lots of people mistake it for one. Only the minority of pages that you find with google are reliable sources. --Amalthea^Talk 23:18, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I realize that it redirects here but it came first. This page never existed until I created it. That page was already in existance. I, have no idea where that hyperlink went before I created this article, probably to a "this page does not exist" page. Daniel Christensen (talk) 15:50, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Not exactly true, this article was first created in 2004 and deleted in October 2007. Pagrashtak 16:43, 14 October 2008 (UTC)