Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of chess-related deaths

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. Policy based consensus shows that this article has an original research and reliable sources issue that haven't been fixed during the course of this debate. The keep commentators mostly ignored those valid concerns with "it's encyclopedic" comments with little or no policy based rationales behind them. Secret ^account 01:00, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

List of chess-related deaths

List of chess-related deaths (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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No evidence that this is really a notable intersection of topics. No sign of RS dealing in depth with this intersection. Dweller (talk) 16:01, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

• Strongly disagree (in other words, keep) - so the dozen references on the article are talking about something else? - DavidWBrooks (talk) 16:14, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

• Delete. While the individual instances are interesting by themselves, there is no indication that "chess-related deaths" is a notable topic per se. Holdek (talk) 18:24, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

I don't quite understand that point - a number of different sources talk about the topic and they're interesting and relevant and valid sources, so what isn't notable? - 23:29, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

The sources don't talk about the topic, they talk about their particular stories. Combining them in an article is inventing a per se phenomenon. (Also, please sign your posts.) --Holdek (talk) 03:35, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

This article is list of chess-related deaths, not history of or concept of chess-related deaths. There's no original research involved. (Oops; if you forget to types the fourth tilde, it's just date/time, not signature.) - DavidWBrooks (talk) 12:29, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

(No worries.)

Is there some other article about the concept of chess-related deaths that this list is an adjunct to? --Holdek (talk) 19:29, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

• Delete as a nonsensical article on an rather pointless topic. –Davey2010 • (talk) 22:00, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
• Delete, a collection of interesting anecdotes, but not really encyclopædic beyond providing cheap laughs. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 23:32, 4 July 2014 (UTC).

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Games-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:05, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:05, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

• Keep - chess related deaths are unfortunately a distinct phenomenon. Not merely anecdotal as suggested. Eg USSR banning chess-playing in space clearly relates to a recognition of the problem of chess related violence. --Zymurgy (talk) 06:30, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Do you have evidence of reliable sources discussing the phenomenon of chess-related deaths, as opposed to individual occurrences. --Dweller (talk) 13:04, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

• Strongly keep Turkeyphan^t 18:34, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

• .... And your reason? ... –Davey2010 • (talk) 18:43, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

• Keep Encyclopedic list, about a well known topic (Chess) that has had major influences in history and culture, which the article helps elaborate upon. Bobcats2b (talk) 16:27, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Bob, no-one is disputing that chess is notable. Let me give you an analogy. You wouldn't expect to find an article on "chess and yoghurt", even though there have notable incidents in the chess world to do with yoghurt (notably during the Cold War). But chess and yoghurt is not a notable intersection, as people haven't discussed the combination of topics in reliable sources, merely individual incidents that combine them. On the other hand, chess and the Cold War would be a notable intersection. Have I explained the difference? --Dweller (talk) 20:57, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Remember, this article is titled list of ... - If there were a dozen novels in which yoghurt and chess were linked, and several historical incidents in which they were linked (Elmer Frobnitz invented Greek yoghurt to distract himself from the pain of losing a chess game to his younger brother) then, yes List of chess-related yoghurt incidents or maybe List of yoghurt-related chess incidents would, indeed, be a legitimate article - as is this. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 21:16, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

DavidWBrooks, that's not my understanding of notability for lists. If you had a couple of newspaper articles remarking on chess-related yoghurt incidents as a phenomenon, that's notable. In the absence of WP:RS discussing the class (rather than single incidents), we can't establish notability. Coming at the problem from bibliographical articles: consider a mid-rank mathematician who has her own wikipedia article. She has written several papers, yet unless someone has published a bibliography in a reliable source (e.g., "collected works" edition or biography), we can't have a standalone bibliography article for her. If I'm wrong, please cite chapter and verse, as this will seriously broaden the scope of the bibliography articles I can write. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 21:30, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

A biography of a particular person is not a list of a type of person, that's what is different. List articles have always bothered some people in wikipedia who find them un-encyclopedic (check the AFD debates - 7 of them! - for list of unusual deaths if you want a real example) but they have been part of this weird little experience for more than the 10 years I've been fiddling with it. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 00:30, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Not Elmer Frobnitz, in fact, but possibly Viktor Korchnoi: "When Karpov's team sent him a bilberry yogurt during a game without any request for one by Karpov, the Korchnoi team protested, claiming it could be some kind of code (such as whether Korchnoi was dead equal or slightly advantageous)." Martinevans123 (talk) 15:24, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Bilberry? That's a new one to me (how I love you, wikipedia). - DavidWBrooks (talk) 15:37, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

• delete While the anecdotes themselves may occur in reliable sources (and the Weekly World News, too!) the phenomenon itself has not received sufficient coverage to warrant an article. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 17:58, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
• Delete Random trivia, only loosely connected. Using Bill Wall as a source in an attempt to justify the article really is clutching at straws - he's a self-published internet writer (most of it came from his geocities page originally). He is notoriously unreliable, repeating anecdotes as facts; he evidently subscribes to the philosophy "if the legend is more entertaining than the truth, print the legend". MaxBrowne (talk) 05:33, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
  • Seems to be a lot of this kind on Wikipedia though (which I acknowledge isn't really an argument). What about Toilet-related injuries and deaths? Bobcats2b (talk) 12:24, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
    • Yeah, the classic "other stuff exists". That article made me laugh, it's practically a satire of wikipedia, even has a "popular culture" section. Does anyone really think toilet-related deaths are a distinct phenomenon? MaxBrowne (talk) 12:57, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
• Delete - Not an encyclopedic topic. Trivia. Carrite (talk) 18:29, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
• Keep - An encyclopedic topic. Not trivia. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:01, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
• Tempted to keep - the juxtaposition of a danger-sport and an activity such as chess has been noted in several blogs, sadly no books that I can see. It gets a fair few views per day. I suspct there will be something out there. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:28, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
• Keep - or at worst perhaps merge into chess article and condense somewhat. No need to get all delete-happy over a list that isn't found in dead tree encyclopedias. Bryce (talk) 05:00, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
• Keep - Sourced list, notable topic, non-trivial intersection.--cyclopia^speak! 15:13, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
• Delete. From the introduction: "The reliability of many of these anecdotes is suspect, but some appear to be based on fact": Uh-oh. Lot of nonsense frankly; In one story an inmate is killing another and according to one story they were discussing chess at some point before the killing; this is frankly too dumb for an encyclopedia; the Wikipedia account also seems to be based directly on the court papers, so it's original resource if no secondary sources are provided. And even with a secondary source, it would in fact be original research to call this "chess-related"; chess is surely not the cause of death. Iselilja (talk) 19:13, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
  • How exactly could chess be a "cause of death"? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:41, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
• Delete. I'm going with "delete" on this one. Based on the article content, I really think it's worth writing about the subject, but until the subject has been written about somewhere else, this is essentially WP:SYNTH. Good and fascinating article, but Wikipedia is not the forum for it. Yes, it has plenty of references for each of the incidents described in the article, but there is no indication (surprisingly,to me) that the intersection of chess and death (especially killing over it), which is the subject of the article, has been the subject of any reliable published sources.

I would be most happy if someone could prove me wrong and unearth such sources, because I really do like the article, and wish it could remain. But there are sound reasons why Wikipedia is a repository of information already published elsewhere, and summarized here, rather than as an original publisher of information particular editors find worth publishing.

Isn't there some chess wiki somewhere that would be a better home for this? TJRC (talk) 21:14, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

• Delete - As others have stated above, very few of the sources actually discuss the phenomenon of "chess related deaths" as a whole. Rather, most of the sources merely support the individual anecdotes. Taking these and trying to tie them all together as a unified list, without the sources to back the concept as a whole up, reeks of synthesis. The few that do talk about deaths of multiple chess players do not seem to be from reliable sources, and several of the sources have nothing to do with the concept at all, and are instead being used to discuss a tangentially related math problem. In addition, a large portion of the article is nothing but unsourced trivia, which would need to be removed regardless of whether the article is kept or not. 64.183.45.226 (talk) 22:51, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

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.