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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 merge to Joshua Clover. Luna Santin 08:05, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Jane Dark

Jane Dark (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) - (View log)

Non notable journalist Hipocrite - «Talk» 04:34, 22 January 2007 (UTC) Should be merged to, you know, the person's real name, but this merge was undone by Badlydrawnjeff, who is clearly not stalking my contributions. Hipocrite - «Talk» 04:55, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete Keep voters unable to verify existance of this non-existant person. Hipocrite - «Talk» 04:59, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
  • False. The external links clearly show existence of someone writing as "Jane Dark." --badlydrawnjeff talk 05:01, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
    • A pen name is not a person. Is the article about a person or a pen name. Unverifiable information is worse than irrelevant information. Hipocrite - «Talk» 05:02, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
      • So let's decide that and move forward, shall we? Neither one is unverifiable, from the looks of things. --badlydrawnjeff talk 05:06, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
      • Let's kill the article on Jandek then. ~ trialsanderrors 07:47, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. I don't see how a journalist for the Village Voice can be non-"notable." Perfect example of why WP:BIO has/needs "just because someone doesn't fall into one of these categories doesn't mean an article on the person should automatically be deleted." --badlydrawnjeff talk 04:42, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• that argument sounds pretty much like WP:ILIKEIT ;-). Ohconfucius 01:39, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

• I think it sounds like "There's no way a journalist for a major magazine isn't 'notable'." --badlydrawnjeff talk 01:46, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

• • You withdraw an AfD as a merge and I'm stalking you? Please. Meanwhile, we have one person claiming Jane Dark is Joshua Clover without evidence or a reason as to why the two should be merged together, and two people thinking it should be kept. Sorry, not thinking a merge is the right move here. --badlydrawnjeff talk 04:57, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep Merge and Redirect (per below) Journalist works for notable pub, is quoted and linked to. IronDuke 04:45, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect--Jane Dark is a pen name of Joshua Clover.-Cindery
• Merge Cindery is correct--Dacium 04:37, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
  • So why merge? --badlydrawnjeff talk 05:01, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
    • The citation in the Jane Dark article--the book Passing explains that Dark is Clover's pen name. At the JC article, under external links--the Academy of American Poets profile-- it states that Jane Dark's Sugarhigh! is Clover's blog.-Cindery 05:04, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
      • Okay. So why merge? --badlydrawnjeff talk 05:06, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
        • Well...it could be kept as an article, but not as a bio. Are there any other stand-alone articles for a pen name or pseudonym? I haven't seen any. I will recuse myself from further discussion because I don't really understand AfD.-Cindery 05:24, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
          • We're not consistent. A.N. Roquelaure is a redirect, Richard Bachman is not. --badlydrawnjeff talk 05:26, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep any verifiable content but Merge & Redirect it to Joshua Clover. Typically we merge this kind of thing until the parent article (in this case Joshua Clover) gets too big and needs to be split. In the meantime I don't think we can show that this pen-name is notable on it's own (ie, no books/articles written about the pen-name) to justify an article on it. (If we want to debate the notability of Joshua Clover then that article would need to be nominated separately). ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 07:10, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Actually, if you read the St. Louis Dispatch review of Passing,--linked at Jane Dark--there is not only a book with a chapter about Dark/Clover pen name phenomenon, but the review calls it the most interesting chapter. But I think I'm still in favor of the merge (frankly, I don't understand the difference--does merge mean Jane Dark article will be there with a redirect to Clover, or will all the Jane Dark content be in the Joshua clover article?--like I said, I don't "get" AfD, sorry if that is stupid question, and for coming back to add my comments if they don't make sense.) Clover noted in Passing that when he was "outed" as Jane Dark, he lost the sense of her as a separate/independent voice...but still used the pen name. So, there is a way in which "Jane" was a separate voice/different writer from Joshua-the-poet, and that has been noted in a book. But I wouldn't say that is really the case now--the voices are merged at the current Sugarhigh! at least, so it makes sense that the articles could be merged. Unless the idea of Jane-as-separate- voice is deemed to have historical value. Because there are so many Village Voice articles by Joshua (more than 200) and only a slim minority of those are noted at his article--on "serious" subjects--and there are also a sizable chunk of VV articles by Jane--on "pop" subjects-- that could make the Clover article messy if merge means all the articles are in one place. Or at least overflowing with links to the VV. :-)-Cindery 07:52, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
    • Maybe to add clarity: Jane's published articles are only about popular culture (whereas Clover's are both pop and serious). And for a few years, no one knew that Clover was Dark. That would be the argument for Jane as separate? Now, it is not a secret that Dark is a pen name of Clover--there has been a book about it, and the Academy of American Poets notes that Dark is a pen name of Clover. Sugarhigh! was a column written by Jane Dark for the Village Voice, but is now the name of Clover's blog (which he writes un-secretly as Jane Dark, and about subjects both pop and serious.) That would be the argument against separation?-Cindery 08:40, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
      • It could be... I'm just not sure if there is enough content published to build an article longer then a stub about "Jane Dark." I think at this point it's fairly clear that the article won't be deleted, so we are just deciding where to put the content... ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 15:06, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• Merge and redirect. There are evidently only a few paragraphs' worth of information to be written about Jane Dark in the forseeable future. There is no reason not to merge them. Any details of the relationship between the two personas can be explained in the Clover article, and are more easily explained together in the same article than by asking readers to fllip back and forth. We don't have separate articles on Walter Carlos and Wendy Carlos, on Currer Bell and Charlotte Bronte, on Paul French and Isaac Asimov, etc. Under the naming convention articles go under the most common name; if "Jane Dark" were far more famous than "Joshua Clover" then the merge would go the other way. The case of Richard Bachman is the exception, not the rule; I'm not sure it's justified, but if it is it would be on the basis of Bachman being so well known and the Stephen King article being so long, neither of which apply here. Dpbsmith (talk) 11:16, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect to Joshua Clover per reasons above. Terence Ong 12:17, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect. I don't see any reason why this would be a separate, if it has its own article that's two articles about the same person. Is Samuel Clements a separate article from Mark Twain? No. --Milo H Minderbinder 13:14, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect. Then do the same thing to Richard Bachman/Stephen King. When a pseudonymous author's real identity is known, I cannot see a compelling reason for an encyclopedia to keep separate articles. Both are about the same topic, after all. Serpent's Choice 14:08, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

  I think in the case of Stephen King it's a matter of article size. Splitting articles due to size is quite a common thing to do. I don't know why it was decided to split it like that, but there you go. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 15:08, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

  It also provides a compelling example of why this kind of split is a bad idea in the long run. The two articles differ on as fundamental a detail as why the pseudonym was used at all. According to the King article, it was to produce more books without appearing to flood the market under a single name. According the the Bachman article, it was primarily an effort to duplicate his success and ensure that his readership was not simply a fluke. In my mind, the King article (at 38k) is not so bloated that a merge of the salient points from Bachman would hurt; some of the accessory details that are book-specific should probably be merged to those articles instead. Regardless, while that'll need to be discussed on the respective talk pages, I think it makes the point clearly for the discussion at hand. Serpent's Choice 15:19, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

  Seems like this is a discussion for those articles' Talk pages, perhaps in conjunction with the {{contradicts}} template. --Dhartung | Talk 20:15, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• Merge/redirect per above. Regardless of other examples, the question of a subarticle seems to depend on whether there is sufficient material, and in this case the obvious answer is that there is not. --Dhartung | Talk 20:15, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect. In the case of Richard Bachman, the creation of the pen name was notable, and there's enough material about the use of the pen name, to warrant an article. Unless there was some big scandal over the Jane Dark pen name, there's not enough information to warrant a separate article. Argyriou (talk) 21:05, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect because once the silly list of links to a dozen individual columns is tripped out we have one short paragraph, clearly well short of the amount of data which would justify a fork even if the main article were as large as Stephen King's (which it ain't). Notable pen names are ones which have their own history, like Kilgore Trout. George Sand and George Eliot have the main article at the pen name, by the way, we make up our minds according to the situation. I am bemused as to why Jeff is so keen on having a separate, very short article for this one, a merge will lose no useful information and will be more informative. Guy (Help!) 15:09, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Note: I wouldn't say he is "keen" on it--he thought there should be discussion about it is all:-Cindery 19:04, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Mainly because I don't consider merging two things that exist as separate entities as useful. --badlydrawnjeff talk 19:20, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if I'd consider writing under two different names "existing as separate entities". You do realize they are the same person, right? --Milo H Minderbinder 19:23, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I do. Pen names serve many purposes, and I don't think we're doing our readers a service in combining articles like this or Anne Rice. --badlydrawnjeff talk 20:09, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Comment: I am going to try an informal test. Before looking them up, I am going to a number of pen names and other pseudonyms, and see how many of them have combined articles for the real name and pseudonym and how many have separate articles. (I'm not interested in whether the article is under the real name or the pseudonym, just "combined" versus "separate.") OK, here's my list: E. Nesbit, Stalin, Pauline Réage, Lemony Snicket, Lewis Carroll, John Wayne, George Eliot, Boz, Saki, TRB. And the results:

• E. Nesbit--no article on Edith Bland
• Joseph Stalin redirects from Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili
• Pauline Réage redirects to Anne Desclos
• Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler are separate
• Lewis Carroll redirects from Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
• John Wayne redirects from Marion Robert Morrison
• George Eliot redirects from Mary Ann Evans
• Boz is a dab page with Charles Dickens as first shoice
• Saki redirects from Hector Hugh Munro
• TRB is separate, and briefly explains and links to four writers who wrote the TRB column.

So, one doesn't count, as there was not an entry for E. Nesbit's real name; six were combined articles; TRB was a separate article for the specific reasons that multiple writers shared that pen name; Boz was a dab page for the same reason; and there is a single case, Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler where there are truly separate articles for a person's real name and pseudonym. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:47, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

• It's tough with Snicket, unfortunately, as the "pen name" is really a character. This probably doesn't help my argument. --badlydrawnjeff talk 01:46, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

• But thanks for pointing out the interesting subtlety. Dpbsmith (talk) 02:03, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
• Apropos of nothing, just occurred to me that there is what is best described as "a character named Stephen King" in Stephen King's novel Song of Susannah... Dpbsmith (talk) 14:14, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

• This is a worse-case delete, as a reviewer in a notable magazine on whom nobody knows a great deal for certain fails WP:RS and WP:N; as a best-case mergeto Joshua Clover for being the pen name of some notable person per User:Cindery. Ohconfucius 01:39, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete both as not notable enough. Is every poet with a couple books and a few bush-league culture articles currently in wikipedia? Should they be? I mean, where's the Nicole Cooley entry, or hatever? I know there's a purported will to encyclopedize everything — but if that were really the case, there would be no WP code about notability in the first place. And it would sure be the easiest solution to this kerfuffle. How about this: delete both, and if there's a big hue and cry, and someone wants to take on the responsibility of remaking them, perhaps that will be suggestive. But if they're deleted and that turns out to be okay, won't we all have one less thing to worry about? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Janedark (talk • contribs)
  • Based on the current content in the Joshua Clover article, he seems to meet WP:BIO. I think if it were a new article and it were nominated for deletion, there would be some discussion but ultimately the consensus would be to keep. In its present state, I think a nomination would probably garner some "speedy keeps" and some expressions of pique at the nominator. But at any rate, I'm about to perform a test. This is just one of my personal criteria for notability. I don't know yet how it will turn out. I personally regard someone as a "real" author if they have a book with an Amazon sales rank of 200,000 or better. I picked 200,000 for fairly arbitrary reasons, but basically it correlates very well with my own opinions on authors whose notability I can judge myself. I'm about to see how Clover's books do. Dpbsmith (talk) 12:16, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
  • His book on The Matrix for the British Film Institute, ISBN 1844570452, has Amazon sales rank #487,980; his book of poetry, The Totality for Kids, ISBN 0520246004 #339,900. Well, I don't know quite how to apply my criterion when there are two books with similar low rank... the nerd in me is tempted to add 1/487980 and 1/339,000 and get 1/200348... I was hoping I could instantly say he's notable on the basis of authorship, but, by my criterion, not quite. These are "real" books, though; I own one of the books in the BFI series (not his). And a claim for notability would be supported by more book-authorship alone. I still think a nomination for deletion would fail, but there might be some serious discussion... Dpbsmith (talk) 12:27, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep and redirect A regular Village Voice film and music critic is notable enough for inclusion. I'm almost neutral on the redirect issue. --Oakshade 01:44, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

She's not listed on the masthead. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:24, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I'd disagree with "regular" as well, looking at the VV website I only found one Joshua Clover article last year, and the latest from Jane Dark there was 2003. He/she has written for them, but obviously not a staff columnist or regular contributor. If anyone favors deleting both articles, the way to go about it is probably to start an AfD on Joshua Clover once this one is done (merged). --Milo H Minderbinder 13:38, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

• Off-topic question--Since nobody's answered it at Talk:Jane Dark, and since there are a lot of people discussing her here now... is "Jane Dark" supposed to be taken as a riff on Jeanne d'Arc? Dpbsmith (talk) 14:19, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
• Comment Hey, let's leave Jandek out of this! You people!  ;-) -- Butseriouslyfolks 07:58, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

• Jandek's actually a good case of when a pseudonym perhaps should be the article title. Although there's somewhat reasonable agreement that Jandek is Smith, there have obviously been other contributors to some Jandek pieces, and the entire career has been a marked attempt to avoid identification or recognition under the artist's real name, with no official confirmation of his identity ever provided. Those attributes distinguish Jandek from this case, where there is no question as to the author's identity (and confirmation by the author himself), and where notability and public recognition have been established under the real name as well. Serpent's Choice 08:11, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

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.