Clear craze (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Concerns about WP:GNG as raised earlier on the article's talk page by another user, which I'll repeat below:

A quick search of Google Scholar returns the sum total of one book that mentions the concept of a "clear craze" ever existing, or that it was a thing that was defined to the 1980s or 1990s. I am almost certain this article fails notability and significance. I am not sure how I ended up here to be honest but I see no significance or notability to this article or its contents. Moreover, I fail to see how the term "clear craze" is encyclopedic in any real sense. Further to the point tabloid trends do not construe a relevant or notable reason for this article to be here.

At current, this article loosely collates a list of products that were released around the 1990s that had a transparent design, which is anecdotally indeed something that some products did during that time that can be called a trend. However, the article's collation of them and framing them as a "clear craze" overstep the mark when the nomenclature and grouping is not subject to significant secondary coverage. We don't have an article for Global Village Coffeehouse even though the term means something and connotes an obvious trend without more secondary sources that substantiate the term. Some reflections include the following:

(1) Firstly, on the use of the phrase, the beverage 'clear craze' seems very loosely to be a thing that some sources like the Newsweek article in the context of the trend to create clear beverages or consumer products to reflect claims about the purity and healthiness of the product. I am not sure that this makes it notable, given that the only source really holding the article up at the moment is the Newsweek one, but it seems that this is where the term is coming from. There's very little secondary analysis, and pivotal sentences in the article like "the clear craze became official with its first wave of products" are unsourced. A brief look around for the term doesn't find much use of "clear craze" as a phrasing, although I found it in or the book The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (around p. 191) [1]. So thinking critically here, without evidence of consumer demand for this style, "craze" at best falsely connotes a marketing strategy that does not, in fact, reflect a "craze" for the products. The most notable example on the page, Crystal Pepsi, was a failure.

(2) Following from that, on the categorisation of products included, the article spuriously conflates the concept of the 'clear craze' as it applied to beverages and consumables to other trends in transparent product design, particularly transparent casings of consumer electronics in the later 90s that seem to have occurred well after the fact of the sourced products. From what I can tell, the link isn't explicitly made by the sources. Ultimately, the article is a list of products with very little explanation of what unites them. There is not a lot of sourcing or analysis to justify why certain things are in the article other than that an editor or other has found a source about a clear-looking product from that era, attributed it to the "clear craze", and put it in. This is not really the most rigorous approach when trying to define a term for a historical design trend.

If this is deemed notable, suggest a rewrite of the article focusing on (a) the substance and use of the term, and (b) being more rigorous about what about products from that era make it attributable to the trend, backed by sources. Welcome any thoughts - thanks! ＶＲＸＣＥＳ (talk) 04:44, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Products-related deletion discussions. ＶＲＸＣＥＳ (talk) 04:44, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]