Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Clue (information)

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 no consensus‎. Only one of the views entered after the dramatic article improvements of the first week of listing argued for deletion. However, that was not enough for me to see a rough consensus for Keep. Feel free to renominate in six months. Owen× ☎ 13:28, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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

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As an article for concept of a clue, I don't really like. For a simple concept, it is as dull as an article for the concept of quality, say for, which there is not because that page is just a disambiguation page. Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary may provide explanations on how to improve this article, but I'm focused on deleting it. So, what do you think? QuantumFoam66 (talk) 03:57, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Language and Social science. C F A 💬 04:02, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: This type of article is known as a broad-concept article and they can often be hard to write without looking like dictionary definitions. Theoretically there probably should be another broad-concept article at Quality, but there isn't. Since this is such a common term, I don't see how this wouldn't meet GNG. C F A 💬 04:10, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep This article defines or gives examples of 1) the concept (information), 2) its different values (share/give/pay), 3) how it is relayed (discovered/shared), 4) its mechanic (ludeme/cheat), 5) its format (straight/cryptic/riddles/contradictions) 6) its etymology. All of this can eventually be expanded and more concrete exemples can be added. "clue" may seem to be a simple concept, but the article shows there are many aspects to it that may not seem obvious at first glance. Writing something that is obvious (or "dull") is because what is obvious to one reader may be a valuable insight to another. As stated in Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_dictionary#Major_differences, Wiktionary entries are about words themselves, while Wikipedia entries are articles about what words denote. This article falls into the latter category. --Bensin (talk) 13:17, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Obvious failure of WP:NOTDICTIONARY. The article fails to demonstrate it can stand on its own as a broad concept article. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 21:05, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

According to Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_dictionary, the following are dictionary entries:

1) Definitions ("contain nothing more than a definition") – No. The article also contains use, value, form, and examples. It also has a well sourced section on context clues.

2) Dictionary entries – No. "Encyclopedia articles are about [...] a concept", which is the case here.

3) Usage, slang, or idiom guides – No. "Clue" is not a slang term.

Please explain in what way you think the article fails WP:NOTDICTIONARY. --Bensin (talk) 22:42, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It fails (1) since it's nothing more than a couple of definitions, with the rest being WP:OR. Where are the sources on clues as a concept? If there were even a single one there, I might think differently. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 01:57, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The article is more than definitions, as I listed in my previous response. Yes, I have had difficulties finding sources for clues in games, possibly because most of it is common knowledge. I'll try and find some. Is there a particular statement that you believe to be untrue? However, the section about context clues is well sourced. --Bensin (talk) 14:24, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I added three book sources for the section about clues in games. --Bensin (talk) 17:07, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete all of the sources being other dictionary entries tells you what you need to know.

The article also contains use, value, form, and examples those things are very typical of what you'd find in a dictionary, the corresponding wikitionary entry has all of those things. in fact usage guides are specifcally mentioned in point #3 that Bensin quoted above as being characteristic of a dictionary entry.

It also has a well sourced section on context clues that is just another dictionary definition of a related term - having two dictionary definitions doesn't mean the article fails NOTDICTIONARY any less. -- D'n'B-t -- 10:54, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

None of the sources for context clues are dictionary entries. Those sources are articles that support the facts in the article.

Can you quote the part of the wikitionary entry that contains how clues (not the word clue) are used, their value, or their form? The wikipedia article is about what the word denotes, not about the word itself. --Bensin (talk) 14:24, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That is also not in this article, save for few lines of OR. -- D'n'B-t -- 17:37, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What is not in the article? What is unsourced original research? --Bensin (talk) 17:46, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. This doesn't seem to be a broad-concept article, so much as a WP:CHIMERA article instead. I'm looking at the examples given at WP:BCA, and I just don't see this coming even close to any of them. Take the example of "particle" there (in physics). There's a core concept that all particles share that can be written about encyclopedically, as a broad topic. But the only thing that's common here is "a clue is something which hints at further knowledge". That's it, and that's merely a DICDEF, which isn't suitable for an entry here. 35.139.154.158 (talk) 22:14, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  For WP:BCA there is a section "Common aspects of sports and games" which lists the article Dead ball. Would you call that article a chimera too? --Bensin (talk) 15:10, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  If you have a point to make, I fail to see it. You're pushing well into WP:BLUDGEONing territory here. 35.139.154.158 (talk) 15:26, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  That is not an answer to the question in my post. --Bensin (talk) 19:05, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• I’m leaning keep as a this could be a start to something much better. Bearian (talk) 01:55, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: AFDs are not a vote count and I see arguments on both sides of whether or not this article meets WP:DICTIONARY or not and how that might impact whether to Keep or Delete this article. At least, that's how I judge the totatlity of this discussion.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:51, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

These changes have been made since the article was nominated for deletion. In short: 9 sources have been added, sturcture has improved with sections, three new sections have been added: "Context clues", "Clue words", and "See also". --Bensin (talk) 15:37, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak Keep (Uncertain, considering a redirect to Inference or similar instead) - The historian and semiotician Carlo Ginzburg refers to "conjectural disciplines",^[1] comparing the use of clues for making conjectures to the use of symptoms for making diagnoses. (Although, this type of theorizing seems more appropriate to include in Forensic science or Conjecture.) Dascal and Weizman (who appear to be some kind of philosophy-adjacent linguists?) proposed "a model of contextual information required for the interpretation of speaker's meaning in written texts. We have further differentiated between context when used for the determination of utterance meaning and speaker's meaning (- as a clue) and for the detection of gaps and mismatch (- as a cue)."^[2] Literary historian Franco Moretti writes of clues as a literary device and a historical trend in detective fiction (e.g. ^[3], where he cites historians, literary critics, philosophers, and psychologists all writing about clues!). All of the above are at least moderately cited. All of this is to say: trivially, the concept of a clue meets WP:GNG (and I think is clearly distinct from something like evidence). Should all of the above conceptual work be discussed on a page called Clue (information)? I'm a little skeptical of that. But I think it serves readers better to keep the article for the moment. WP:CHIMERA seems to suggest we create e.g. Clues in detective fiction, Epistemology of conjecture, and Context clue as separate articles, all linked from Clue.

A tangential comment: the disambiguation page Hint links to Clue (information) as the first entry. In education, there's a huge body of work on hints (what makes a good hint, how to create good hints, when and how to give hints, etc.) I don't think that "hints" as a concept should live on a page called "clue", so it should probably be a mission for a future editor to create Hint (education). Suriname0 (talk) 20:30, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - even in its improved form, this article is not much more than a definition with subsections of several different concepts that don't really have that much in common besides their all fitting under the extremely loose overarching definition of a "clue". This would be like having an article for Object where the philosophical definition, the notion as used in programming, and an astronomical object are all subsections under a lead which gives the dictionary definition. The stuff Suriname0 talks about seems interesting but probably deserves its own article separate from this. ― novov (t c) 05:44, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: I don't see a consensus, can participants reexamine the article after improvements to it?
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:12, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - The article is clearly more than a WP:DICDEF, and there are a ton of sources out there from use in games to computational models to mathematical models... Just the concept of "design clues" is a topic spanning several fields of design. If anything this topic is too big for an article, but that can be solved by splits if it actually becomes a problem. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:35, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, article is a useful piece of information, and in any event seems improved over this time. Hyperbolick (talk) 06:10, 25 August 2024 (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.