Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Whose Line Is It Anyway?

– no consensus to delete. ~ Ningauble 17:59, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Whose Line Is It Anyway?
So this is a pretty massive deletion request... specifically, Whose Line Is It Anyway? is our second-largest article on the wiki. I hate to kill what so many have worked on, but quite frankly, it'll be almost impossible to bring this article up to anything resembling a serviceable page. Each episode is half an hour long; that means no more than two quotes an episode. I can't tell how far over the limits the article is because of the horrible content organization.

Our absolute largest article, Mystery Science Theater 3000, is in need of some trimming as well, but the difference there is that it's already organized by episode. Whose Line is broken up by the various games they play in each episode; that's not a valid organization method. Taking a look at List of Whose Line Is It Anyway? UK episodes shows how spread out the games are; trying to figure out where each of these quotes goes is a monumental task that, frankly, I don't think anyone is going to do. The talk page was tagged with checkcopyright more than two years ago, and I can't see any evidence that an attempt to address the problem has been made.

I honestly think the easiest way to salvage this article is to nuke it and start from scratch (and preferably by having separate articles for the UK and US versions of the show; that's one of the problems with the article, but even after you split it, the organization is terrible). Without any context for the existing quotes (as far as what episode they were used in), there's nothing here that can be salvaged for future use. — EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 03:33, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Vote closes: 04:00, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Trim, per nom. I agree that this would be an extremely painful amount of work to get this page into something useful and so I also agree that we might be best served by starting over. What I would suggest is to at least find a quote or two from a specific episode and turn this page into a stub page at least, with the proper format of quotes by episode to serve as a blueprint for correctly repopulating the page. ~ UDScott 13:41, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Trim to whatever is already properly sourced on the page, per UDScott. BD2412 T 15:21, 1 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment: This article exhibits several things that often go wrong with Wikiquote articles on serial broadcast productions. In addition to the problems of sourcing and quantity of quotes from individual broadcasts noted in the nomination, several of the quotes are too long, and very many of the quotes are good for a momentary giggle but lack any enduring quotability. All of the current twenty largest articles, and many other productions partitioned by seasons or other sub-pages, suffer from a problem of absolute quantity that is not addressed by the guidance at WQ:LOQ on quantity relative to the size of the source. When contributors use Wikiquote to log everything they find interesting from a serial production, the resulting digest becomes indigestibly large. There is no doubt that many of these serials contain highly memorable quotes that have a non-zero probability of appearing in future editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. For a visitor to the site who is looking for quotations of general interest, rather than studying the quoted work, the probability of ever noticing any of those gems buried in a gargantuan page is vanishingly close to zero. I believe that such pages are complete failures, even when they are meticulously sourced and follow WQ:LOQ scrupulously. To those who have occasionally remarked "It's all good!" I would say that is a reason to watch the original production, not a reason to include it all here. Of course, any sort of "rule" about absolute quantities would be as hard to swallow as a pint of castor oil. Instead, I invite the community to consider what sort of guidance might usefully be adopted to steer contributors toward featuring highly quotable quotes in an accessible format, rather than burying them so completely that they might as well have been omitted. ~ Ningauble 18:43, 2 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The article is an uninformative mess and should be deleted. 69.196.169.216 00:15, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Update: I have "trimmed" the article with a meat axe, removing the parts that lacked unambiguous sources. I am not expressing an opinion on the quotability of what remains. ~ Ningauble 13:14, 21 September 2011 (UTC)