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. Fuzheado | Talk 03:45, 12 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

List of prolific writers[edit]

List of prolific writers (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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A highly contentious article which doesn't conform WP:V. Wikipedia is not a repository or an indiscriminate collection of information WP:NOTCATALOG. Surprisingly authors with 100+ publishing (possibly self-publishing too) made it to the "prolific writers" list. RationalPuff (talk) 18:20, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. RationalPuff (talk) 18:20, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. RationalPuff (talk) 18:20, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 18:23, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:39, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete there are no standard definitions of what makes one "prolific". We should not have a list that it can lead to a long debate as to what does and does not belong. Any actual cutoff with not overcome the problem of being entirely arbitary. Also, since this encompasses "writers" it is open to debate if we must limit this to published works as opposed to output. Beyond that, since it is writers, it means we include not just novels, but short stories, non-fiction works, articles, and anything else published if we do cover just published works. This leads to three questions - to be prolific do we mean total titles or total pages. If we mean the former, then the most prolific people will be those who focus on short stories and articles, if we use the latter than people who turn out 1000-plus page books will be considered most prolific.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:18, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete This article looks to me like a good example of item #1 on WP:NOTCATALOG: "Lists or repositories of loosely associated topics." The "prolific" quality of the listed authors that binds them together on this list comes across to me as offering marginal Wikipedia:Notability. Add to that the problem of defining "prolific." The list currently limits itself to "authors with more than 100 books," but as John Pack Lambert points out, this is still very worthy of challenge given the variable length of books and the ability to publish prolifically without producing books. This list does have a lot of unreferenced content (WP:V), but I think that issue is not the one that supports deletion since it could be fixed. But then it would still be a repository of topics loosely associated around a hard-to-define theme that I think lacks notability. --Dugan Murphy (talk) 21:28, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Beryond that, where did people ever agree that 100 was the line of prolific. At least they assert it, but to categorize or build a list around something we need to do more than assert it, we need reliable sources to show that this cut-off exists as a standard measure, not just in the mind of a Wikipedia editor somewhere.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:54, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. This sounds like it would be extremely subjective, particularly since the term "writer" encompasses a wide variety of persons: poetry, song lyricists, novelists, short story writers, screenwriters, and so on. The line being drawn at 100 books is a bit of an eyebrow raiser since this eliminates many writers who are very commonly referred to as prolific, such as Stephen King, Laurell K Hamilton, and Charles Dickens, the latter of whom wrote 15 novels while also writing hundreds of shorter fiction and non-fiction works. This list also seems to focus on writers of fiction and doesn't seem to include prolific non-fiction writers like Sita Ram Goel or researchers who put out hundreds upon hundreds of journal articles.

My point here is that this article as it stands is extremely subjective. I suppose that there could be some merit in having an article that does cover something like "fiction authors described as prolific" but the article would have to be very carefully written and would have to very clearly define what the article covers and why this is something worth covering on Wikipedia. I think that it's possible, but would take an extremely large amount of work and would effectively need to be written from scratch. Even then there would be some question as to its suitability even if it's limited to authors with articles, given that the term "prolific" can be applied fairly widely. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 04:28, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete POV concerns from a pair of AfD's I encountered (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of prolific songwriters and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of prolific singers) in early 2018 still apply here, except that there is less geobias. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 20:30, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• comment List of best-selling fiction authors workers better since the total sales of their books is far more important than the number of things they published. Dream Focus 21:16, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete or Rename This just needs to go or be renamed something else. How is a prolific writer truly determined? It's way too subjective. --ARoseWolf (Talk) 21:36, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete: Agree with all arguments above. This is too subjective, and defining appropriate inclusion criteria would step beyond Wikipedia's reliance on outside reliable sources. -- 2pou (talk) 20:54, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak Delete with no prejudice against recreation; there's too much conflation of novels, short-stories, pamphlets, and even letters to make the "published works" count meaningless. I think a list of authors with >100 novels would probably be fine, though for now Lists of books#Writer lists probably is good enough. power~enwiki (π, ν) 02:16, 12 January 2021 (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.