Misplaced Pages

Latest revision as of 07:33, 16 March 2022

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. And a salute to those editors who worked to rescue this article, well done! j⚛e decker 21:13, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Pad feet

Pad feet (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Declined WP:PROD. {{prod}} {{prod2}}and {{unreferenced}} tags removed without explanation or improvement. Misplaced Pages is not a dictionary of furniture terminology. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:21, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

• note:' the article has moved a few times during the AFD and is now located as Club foot (furniture) --Errant 17:46, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

• Keep The topic is clearly notable - see Taunton's Complete Illustrated Guide to Period Furniture Details, for example. The deletion process does not seem to have been followed and the proposal to delete this promising topic is contrary to our editing policy. Colonel Warden (talk) 23:28, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Bullshit. The article was tagged as unsourced stub since 2006 until you decided to remove the tag without adding a source. Instead of trying to pencil-whip this nom with essays and deletion policy subsections, why don't you try actually improving the damn thing if you care so much. The "source" you provide proves that pad feet exist and are used on furniture. Big deal. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:30, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

• It is our policy that it is uncivil to make demands of this sort of other editors, who work as unpaid volunteers: "Focus on improving the encyclopedia itself, rather than demanding more from other users." So, if you want the article to be improved then please attend to the matter yourself. AFD is not cleanup. Colonel Warden (talk) 23:33, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

• That's specious logic and you know it. I am suggesting the article be deleted because this is just a dictionary definition of a part of some pieces of furniture and not a particularly notable concept. You are suggesting that it is notable and could be expanded. Suggesting that is not enough, you need to prove it if the article is to kept, instead of just throwing policy links around. The onus is in fact on you to back up what you say with reliable sources that clearly establish the notability of pad feet. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:48, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

• I just did that. What you should please do is withdraw your unsupported assertions about the dictionary nature of this stub which are explicitly contradicted by our actual policy on the matter: "Another perennial source of confusion is that some paper dictionaries, such as "pocket" dictionaries, lead editors to the mistaken belief that dictionary articles are short, and that short article and dictionary article are therefore equivalent.". What gives an article a dictionary style is not its length but its focus upon lexical content - spelling, etymology, grammar, &c. We do not have this here and so the policy is not relevant. Colonel Warden (talk) 23:54, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm really not interested in a "my policy is bigger than your policy" pissing contest with you. Again I suggest that instead of trying to find policies to refute the deletion nomination you try actually fixing the problem by adding multiple reliable sources that establish notability to the article. (As opposed to linking the AFD to a very brief mention in a book on furniture). Beeblebrox (talk) 02:37, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Per the adage that it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish, it seem best to focus upon correcting your misunderstanding of policy and process. Above, you claim that this is a dictionary style article. Have you now read the WP:DICDEF policy? Do you now withdraw? If not, please quote a relevant passage and explain its applicability, if you can. Colonel Warden (talk) 06:35, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Delete. Obviously no sources have ever covered such a mundane topic in detail. Doctorfluffy (robe and wizard hat) 05:39, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Please see Taunton's Complete Illustrated Guide to Period Furniture Details or the Britannica encyclopedia of American art which cover the topic in detail. Colonel Warden (talk) 06:35, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• I can't see the content of those sources. Can you elaborate on how you are defining "in detail"? Doctorfluffy (robe and wizard hat) 16:27, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Delete (Merge to cabriole leg, in light of the ability to source existence, this is clearly heavily related to these legs) no sources provided on the article. Can't find any easy-to-use ones via online searches. Sources highlighted above may be useful, the first has some mentions, but I am not certain it is enough to establish stand-alone notability (more like a section on cabriole leg). On a general note: it is the onus of those claiming keep because it can; be sourced to do the sourcing. --Errant 09:39, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• It is our policy that Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia, not a search engine or collection of links to other third-party sources. Our primary purpose is to create our own content, not to plagiarise the work of others and violate their copyright. Per core policy, sourcing is only required in articles to verify contentious or unclear points. Accordingly, there is no requirement for anyone to add sources if we are satisfied that the content is accurate. The onus is on those who wish to challenge points of detail to place {{fact}} tags where needed. Banner tags which do not address such points of detail are disruptive because they are indiscriminate and unhelpful. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:57, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• That is, I am afraid, absolute nonsense. All articles should be sourced, partly to establish notability (which is the core issue in this case) and partly to show the accuracy of the content. The article going to AFD essentially says we are disputing the content, please provide sources. You seem to be removing a lot of banner tags without addressing the issues in them - please stop, or address the issues, because it might be construed as disruptive. Banner tags are well accepted policy where articles have a general problem, e.g. a lack of sourcing. I am concerned you may have a distinct misunderstanding of how WP works and how articles are written. BTW the policies state that it is the onus of the person supporting material to provide sources. --Errant 10:04, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• You seem to be wrong in every particular. I have cited multiple policies to support everything that I say and can provide more if some point seems unclear. You have provided no such supporting material. Colonel Warden (talk) 10:14, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Sorry, but you appear to have demonstrated a clear mis-reading of WP:V, it is definitely not saying "only content that is contentious should be sourced". It says, quite clearly, that all content should be sourced, but that it is not required, in practice, to source every sentence. The policy them demands that specifically material that is challenged or likely to be challenged must be sourced. Please have another read, and if you are still confused I recommend posting at WT:V where people will be able to explain the policy in more detail. It is worth also pointing out that WP:Notability says Information on Misplaced Pages must be verifiable; if no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article.. WP:SOURCES says Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. --Errant 10:51, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Aha, I forgot the most obvious (and 100% explicit) explanation, from WP:OR: This means that all material added to articles must be attributable to a reliable published source, even if not actually attributed. The sourcing policy, Verifiability, says a source must be provided for all quotations, and for anything challenged or likely to be challenged—but a source must exist even for material that is never challenged. --] 10:54, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Indeed but note that WP:V states "...but in practice not everything need actually be attributed." This AFD does not constitute a challenge to the accuracy of the information because the basis of the nomination is that the article is a dictionary definition. And so it is not necessary to add sources to the article in this case. It is important to resist demands for sources in uncontroversial cases for several reasons. Firstly, it is a chore which few editors will bother with and the few that are willing to do it are thus overloaded and should save their efforts for the more important cases. Secondly, if editors are pressed to follow sources closely then it tends to encourage plagiarism and copyright violation. See the recent case of User:Gavin.collins who was recently sanctioned for this. Editors should understand that they are expected to write articles in their own words. Provided that they are accurate and the topic is uncontroversial, there is little need of inline citation and such references should be used lightly. Colonel Warden (talk) 12:06, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Sorry Colonel, you are entirely incorrect. Secondly, if editors are pressed to follow sources closely then it tends to encourage plagiarism and copyright violation - this is complete nonsense. Firstly, it is a chore which few editors will bother with and the few that are willing to do it are thus overloaded and should save their efforts for the more important cases. - everything should be considered an important case, especially as this is up for AFD. It is NOT at all established in the article whether this is a significant or notable subject, which is where the sources come in. This appears to be a pattern in your AFD arguments, I am going to try and bring this up on a more public forum for clarification so you are able to understand. --Errant 12:22, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
• Hopefully this will be able to clarify things --Errant 12:34, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• I have responded further in that discussion where I maintain much the same position. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:22, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• You know, maybe if you didn't start avery badgering remark you make with condescending and insulting statements that imply the other party is a moron and you are a genius who has full comprehension of every Misplaced Pages policy you would find other users a little more receptive to what you have to say. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:37, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Amen to that. SnottyWong  23:28, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

• Comment This information probably fits best at Cabriole leg. There are many sources describing a pad foot as being used on this leg, but discussion of pad feet independent of cabriole legs is more elusive. This is a perfectly viable small article. It may make sense to merge to a larger article discussing features of furniture but that does not need to be decided here. pablo 11:12, 11 October 2010 (UTC)edited  pablo 15:26, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
• Keep. This is an obviously encyclopedic topic. Printed encyclopedias don't treat it because they didn't have the space and experts that would have been necessary, not because it made no sense to include the topic. The topic falls into the area of industrial art, more specifically carpentry, which generally suffers from a relative lack of reliable sources. Nevertheless I am sure sufficient sources to build an article on exist somewhere.

If our current notability rules do not allow treating this topic in a separate article, then this is a defect in the rules that comes from optimising them too much w.r.t. keeping crap out. Since we are supposed to be writing an encyclopedia, the solution is to ignore or adjust the rules.

It's not currently much of an article, so it should probably be merged into a related article. I haven't found a good one yet, but cabriole leg is not appropriate because the applicability of pad feet is much wider. Wherever you have a large number of chairs in a room but no carpet, you have pad feet. If for some reason you don't, you can buy these things in little packages in any DIY shop before your parquet gets scratched. (Please correct me if I am confusing pad feet with something more general that typically only has the "pad" part. That would then be the most natural topic for a more general article to turn the present one into. For the moment I am assuming that the pads + adhesive stickers that you can buy everywhere are a special case of pad feet.)

Misplaced Pages has a systemic bias against industrial arts: People don't tend to get obsessed with such topics as they do with railways, for example, and those who work in the area tend to be more interested in creating something concrete with their hands than in writing texts and debating with others who think it might not be important. Let's do something against this bias, not support it. Hans Adler 12:45, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

the applicability of pad feet is much wider - do you have a citation for this? Because so far I cannot find one, if it exists then I would probably support your view. For the moment I am assuming that the pads + adhesive stickers that you can buy everywhere are a special case of pad feet - I'm not sure we can make this assumption w/o a source. --Errant 12:51, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Maybe not. As a non-native speaker of English I have trouble with these little words for everyday things. Apparently the correct terms for what I have in mind are floor protector and furniture pad The pad foot is clearly just a luxury version of the floor protector. It is absurd that this doesn't have an article, while dance pad does. Surely there would be no problem covering pad feet under a new article floor protector until we get an expert with the necessary carpentry literature on their shelf decides to split it off again. Hans Adler 12:58, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Uh, dance pad is an entirely unrelated thing :D which is well sourced. If we could source this article in the same way then I would be all for it! Agreed on the idea of floor protector, I will try and find some sources for such an article. --Errant 13:05, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Indeed. But it is the only article in the entire encyclopedia in which the words "floor protector" appear. That's how I found it. I think that's a good example of our bias against the fundamental, simple things of life. Of course much more important topics are also affected by that, and the problem has already been noted by the Misplaced Pages 1.0 team. Hans Adler 13:12, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Ok, it appears from this ref that we are talking about the actual feet here (and the word pad is misleading us). I've created the article foot (furniture) off that cite and I recommend we merge this into it & work on adding refs for the other forms of feet. Thoughts? --Errant 13:22, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Coming from a discussion in WP:V is there any way we can make a glossary for furniture terms, which this whole entry would easily fall in there? --MASEM (t) 13:26, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Not a bad idea, I'd support that --Errant 13:35, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Regarding the current topic, people looking for sources should note that these feet are also known as Dutch feet, spoon feet and duck feet though some sources maintain that duck feet are a different style. It seems to be mainly a matter of style though the feet obviously have to make contact with the floor in a satisfactory way. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:31, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Where are you finding this information? I am struggling to find decent sources & a few specific pointers would be great. --Errant 13:35, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• At the head of this discussion, there are links to various Google searches. Google Books seems the most productive for this type of topic. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:42, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Going through those, nothing majorly usable. It just sounded like you were reading from a specific source so I wondered what it was :) --Errant 13:43, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• The information comes from various furniture encyclopedia which all seem to say something about this style of foot as it is a distinctive feature of antique American furniture. Note that, when searching, you should allow for variations such as foot/feet. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:48, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Keep - As the article is currently sourced, it meets WP:GNG. Whether or not it should be merged into a wider topic on furniture feet or a glossary of terms is an editorial decision.--Mike Cline (talk) 15:21, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
• Keep. This is the type of discussion that sometimes makes me despair of Misplaced Pages. This is a topic that has had hundreds of years of notability, but is being treated as if it was an ephemeral piece of current popular culture. If we want to have any claim to be a serious encyclopedia then we should find some way of preventing such frivolous deletion nominations. For evidence of notability please refer to the Colonel's comments above. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:00, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Aw c'mon Phil. The article was prodded because it had no sources. The Colonel removed the prod without adding any sources. WP:V is not negotiable. Look carefully at the article history and you will see that it was only after the afd started that anyone now calling to keep this article even tried to establish notability. You can say that notability has now been established, but the nom was based on the lack of sources and the fact that an endorsed prod was summarily declined without explanation or improvement to the article. I don't happen to have any books on the history of furniture feet in my house, so I didn't have any sources of my own and since none were attached to the article it is fair to claim that notability was not established or even claimed by the pre-nomination version of the article. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:10, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Phil Bridger is exactly right. This AfD, and how seriously it was taken, only proves that Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia-writing project by a bunch of people who haven't got the faintest clue what an encyclopedia is, and what it is good for. Consequently they can't be guided by a vision and are mechanically interpreting a set of rules instead. (Even more "keep" results of AfDs are symptoms of the same problem, but that's something I am used to.) Hans Adler 20:29, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict)The way this AfD has gone makes me despair a bit too. Removing a prod without explaining the removal or discussing it is not constructive. Cutting and pasting links to various policy pages and expounding on one's own interpretation of them consumes more time and pixels than actually improving the damn article to clearly meet inclusion standards. 'Rescue' my arse.  pablo 22:06, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

• Keep Decent article which needs some work, with good sources. Well worth keeping. scope_creep (talk) 22:09, 11 october 2010 (UTC)
• Keep The sources are sufficient, as usually turns out to be the case when straightforward uncontroversial material is in question. I agree of course that the sources should have been added in the first place, & it is careless writing not to do so. But it's equally careless to nominate all such for deletion without taking a look oneself. The job of improving sourcing is the responsibility of everyone who works on an article. And myself, I interpret the statement in WP V "This policy requires that anything challenged or likely to be challenged, including all quotations, be attributed to a reliable source in the form of an inline citation, and that the source directly supports the material in question." as meaning "This policy requires that anything reasonably challenged or likely to be challenged in good faith, including all quotations, be attributed to a reliable source in the form of an inline citation or other sufficiently specific citation, and that the source directly supports the material in question." Challenging unexceptionable material is an unproductive waste of effort when there is so much unsupported actual junk around--in older established articles as well as stubs. DGG ( talk ) 22:00, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
• Keep Nice improvements by various editors on the article since the AFD. Google book search seems to show plenty of furniture books that mention this, and thus verify its existence. Dream Focus 22:05, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Note that no-one was questioning its existence.  pablo 10:37, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Arts-related deletion discussions. —Hegvald (talk) 05:19, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
• Note: The article under discussion here has been flagged for {{rescue}} by the Article Rescue Squadron. SnottyWong 14:36, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
• Keep per sources provided here. "why don't you try actually improving the damn thing" "you try actually fixing the problem by adding multiple reliable sources" exactly Beeblebrox, why don't you spend more time improving articles then deleting other editors good faith contributions. Preaching to others about improvement is extremely hypocritical. Okip 00:15, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Wow, welcome back okip/ikip/travb/inclusionist/whatever your name is this week. If you would care to check my contribs before insulting me you may just find that I have in fact improved a few articles in the last few days, they just aren't on any radical inclusionist rescue lists at the moment. Unlike the rescue squad, I don't have any agenda other than improving Misplaced Pages. If you remove a prod from an article that has nominated because it had no sources, you damn well need to add some sources. To do otherwise is disingenuous and hypocritical. If it takes an AFD to get somebody off their ass and encourage them to put their money where their mouth is, that's fine with me. Beeblebrox (talk) 06:26, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Another case of WP:IDONTLIKETHENOMINATOR.  pablo 09:00, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

• Changed !vote to keep on the basis of the article being verified and corrected using RS's --Errant 17:47, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

• Keep per improvements to the article since AfD started. The state the article was in prior to the AfD certainly warranted a prod. Colonel Warden's edit warring to remove the prod without discussion was inappropriate, and such behavior only serves to support the inclusionist/deletionist battleground mentality. Had a civil, rational discussion taken place regarding the article's problems, then this AfD likely wouldn't have had to happen and the article could have been quietly improved without wasting everyone's time. It seems that having a civil, rational discussion is a lot to ask of some people. SnottyWong  23:37, 13 October 2010 (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.