Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Castle Adventure

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 keep. John254 01:43, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Castle Adventure (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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This game lacks non-trivial coverage by reliable third party publications and I believe it should be deleted on those grounds. JBsupreme (talk) 07:26, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. I just Googled "Castle Adventure" and found a rather large number of sites that provided coverage by a reliable third party. Every site out there dedicated to classic games of that era, seems to list it. It is notable. Dream Focus (talk) 08:09, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. I personally find such articles useful. I'm partial to the formal documentation of early computing, including obscure games (by the size of today's markets, almost all early games would be obscure). By their nature, these items are seldom covered by third party publications that are currently online (note, there's a lot of stuff still in paper that likely did mention games such as these). -- Quartermaster (talk) 13:05, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Your argument implies WP:USEFUL -- if there is no reliable third party publications written on this subject, we simply cannot cover it. JBsupreme (talk) 13:46, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Did you bother to Google? There are plenty of third party publications written on this. It was a major game back in those days. Gamespy has an article on it, as do other major gaming sites, well recognized as valid sources. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=+gamespy&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images There are 1900 sites returned when I used Google to search just the English Wikipedia for the word "Gamespy". Looking over that, you will find it is used as a reference and quoted from quite frequently in many articles. Dream Focus (talk) 16:45, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Your link does not work. Rather than direct people to a useless Google search, please cite any relevant non-trivial publications about this subject. JBsupreme (talk) 18:42, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This debate has been added to the list of video game related deletions. MrKIA11 (talk) 21:37, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Er, if we're not obligated to check what can be done with the article in addition to what has been done before deeming it deletable, doesn't that lead to nuking substantial portions of the encyclopedia with each major change of standards? --Kizor 22:34, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. This is article describes a game classic which is part of the computer gaming history. Btw.: When will this deletion madness come to an end. Deleting articles is like throwing the work of many people away for no reason. Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedy. It is not necessary to save paper. Instead adding a notability value to every page could be helpful to destinguish between more or less important articles. Zron (talk) 22:54, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep per Quatermaster, Zron. Xihr (talk) 23:20, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep – If verifible, reliable third-party sources can be found as claimed. It should be kept. One can also claim notability by way of assuming that this is part of early computing/computer programming history. Then, it just needs to be cleaned up. MuZemike (talk) 00:19, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep as it is a classic game and the computer game history would not be complete without it. The were links to several reliable third-party sources in the External links section of the article but they were removed (maybe to prepare the deletion of the article):
  • The Key to the Castle — a Castle Adventure fansite
  • Articles for deletion/Castle Adventure at MobyGames
  • Castle Adventure — a modern clone
  • Castle - a modernized open source version written in Seed7

The attemt to remove one of this links is discussed at Talk:Castle_Adventure. BTW I think that Zron's idea of adding some notability value to every page is good. That concept could replace Afd discussions by discussions to raise or lower the notability value of a page. Non notable pages (which might be seen as notable by a minority) could still be there and the notability value would be displayed somewhere outside the article. Georg Peter (talk) 06:55, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. I used to play it in the 80s. I can confirm that it existed at that time and it is certainly not a hoax. Later, maybe in the 90s, I looked for the souce code of the program, but I was not able to find it. Now it seems that some people rewrote it (or rewrote modified versions of it) from scratch. Good. Raise exception (talk) 07:17, 28 June 2008 (UTC) — Raise exception (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
• Delete Lacks significant coverage in the multiple reliable sources needed to demonstrate notability and provide the materials to write an encyclopedia article. Home of the Underdogs is a very weak source, being an abandonware site, yet is the best of all the mentions I can find. None of the above sources are appropriate for referencing or providing reliable material. The only GameSpy reference I've found so far is this, which is not GameSpy, it's a personal website hosted on the classic gaming network. Games of historical importance are covered in the multitude of books published about videogames, meaning they'd never be permastubs and notability would be demonstrable. I'd be happy to switch to keep if some of these abundant reliable sources which supposedly exist are demonstrated. Someoneanother 13:05, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - per Someoneanother, Home of the Underdogs is not a great source of notability, and the review barely touches into critical coverage. Other than that, no non-trivial coverage in reliable verifiable sources independent of the topic to demonstrate notability. Sephiroth BCR ^(Converse) 09:16, 29 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, the Castle Adventure fanside is IMHO a reliable source. I also think that the other links like "Home of the Underdogs" are reliable sources. There are lots and lots of mentions of this game in the internet. The people voting to delete, may be too young to know about this game. I have also a critic point to the whole Afd process: It is said that the process should establish a consensus among Wikipedia editors. How can there be a consensus, if a majority is aggainst something. I have seen deleted articles, where a big majority voted for keep and where the keep arguments also had a majority, and they all were ignored. I am sure there is also the silent majority which is not interested in deleting information. There is IMHO a small minority which pushes deletions. Over the time new reasons like importance have been invented to account for deletions. BTW.: I consider adding markers like "few or no other edits outside this topic" as some form of racism. Hans Bauer (talk) 09:54, 29 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Please assume good faith with those who are !voting "delete" - the article has legitimate issues it must address if the topic is to assert any notability. Do not attempt to snub us by claiming we're "too young" or by citing other AfDs, as they're not valid arguments. And that site you've provided is a fansite - please look at WP:RS. Anyhow, adding the marker "few or no other edits outside this topic" is part of the fact that editing to Wikipedia is transparent - it is not racism, it is fact. It's not racist to say that African Americans tend to graduate from high school in the United States less than whites, as it's a fact (depends on the context naturally, but that's not relevant here). Same principle here. Sephiroth BCR ^(Converse) 10:02, 29 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Experience of the game irrelevant in determining the quality and scope of the supporting sources. Wikipedia is not about self-appointed experts writing original research from their own experiences, instead we use reliable sources. I owned and played this game a long time ago, that has nothing to do with my standpoint which is about the suitability of the game for an article. The fansite is just that, unless it can be demonstrated that the writer is a more authorative source than the next guy on this subject, it offers nothing which can be used to cite an article with. Someoneanother 12:33, 29 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak keep - Notability isn't a subjective judgment of how much we appreciate an article. It's a matter of having multiple, reliable secondary resources that are independent of the subject. We are simply not allowed to write articles based on self-published fan sites or original observations. Here are a few reliable sources that deal with Castle Adventure, including Moby Games, GameSpot, and GameSpy. The coverage is weak, however. But I've seen enough just on google to convince me that there is some information on this game in an older gaming publication. Anyone have some old gaming magazines, or a specialty book about text games? Randomran (talk) 16:21, 29 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. It was advertised in many magazines in the 1980's as an adventure game (google book results). The subject is notable because it gained popularity when Keypunch Software controversially and illegally published the game a few years later, becoming one of the most popular non-commercial games of the 80's (1, 2). It was a very early example of shareware (1). Care should be taken with any google search to include "Kevin Bales" as there are several Castle Adventure products. A google search of "Castle Adventure" "Kevin Bales" indicates a great number of hits for something that existed well in advance of the Internet, or indeed, the Video game industry as it stands today. WP:NOTE is a guideline, and even if it wasn't, there would be a good case for breaking the rules with this article. While these sources listed above are not necessarily great for verifying the information, they would appear to support that the game was notable at the time it was released, and notability is not temporary. Any article that was notable in 1984, would still be notable now. Yes, I can accept that the notability of the sources is questionable, and that its tough to verify. But when considering deletion it is important to not just consider whether notability is established by the article, but whether it readily could be. I think that the notability of the game, if it hasn't already been established, could be if we were to read through magazines from the mid 1980's. Bear in mind that gaming media didn't exist as such back then, and this game was created by 14 year old and later stolen and illegally released by a company. This is why it received notoriety in later years. Icemotoboy (talk) 01:11, 1 July 2008 (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.