Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/RinkWorks

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 delete. MBisanz ^talk 00:15, 17 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

RinkWorks[edit]

This page has been almost entirely unreferenced in over five years of existence. The only source is a NYT article with a one sentence mention, and besides that the only news mentions I could find were a brief flurry from 9 years ago when just one section got the webmasters in trouble. This leads me to believe ethat the site falls under WP:ONEEVENT as there is virtually nothing besides trivial mentions, outside the scope of this one brief event. Furthermore, the article is in a sorry state, with only two edits since December and some issues with tone. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 00:31, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and improve. This website may have passed its peak before Wikipedia was born, but its history is its strength. I still visit this site regularly, though not associated with it, so I'll see if I can help fix it up a bit. - Kevin Saff (talk) 01:42, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There is a list of media mentions of the site here. Yeah, a lot in 1998, but the web was still small in '98. It's significant that the site has outlasted a number of other sites from that era, several of which are probably named on Wikipedia. Also, the site is one of very few places to serve high quality menu-based choose-your-own-adventure games. I strongly object to the idea that this site is a one-hit wonder. -- Kevin Saff (talk) 01:51, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I checked the media mentions section of their website, but only a couple seemed to have any real meat on them. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 01:52, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Did you see that New Hampshire Business Review article? It's not just a shoutout like several others, but actually a significant article with interview conducted in 2005 at least five years after the site peaked. May we all be so lucky... Anyway, lots of juicy info in that article, such as Bank of America threatening to sue them. -- Kevin Saff (talk) 05:16, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC, notice that RinkWorks' Dialectizer was still quite popular when Google added its humorous translations into bork bork, Elmer Fudd, Leet-speak, Pig latin, etc. All of those were in the Dialectizer. There is probably no way to conclusively prove that RinkWorks inspired those Google features, but the fact is it was the most popular such humorous translator -- and probably the only one with those exact languages -- on the web when Google added those features. I submit that any website which inspires a google feature is notable. -- Kevin Saff (talk) 02:24, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a Metafilter link announcing this google feature on June 27, 2001. One of the commenters mentions RinkWorks admin Samuel Stoddard and the Dialectizer. No other websites are mentioned. I'm going to poke around some more, problem is there probably won't be any print articles about this and a lot of websites have died in 8 years. -- Kevin Saff (talk) 02:48, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Websites-related deletion discussions. -- — LinguistAtLarge • Talk 05:05, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Article has been significantly improved from time of proposed deletion. - Fastily (talk) 05:46, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Meh, I'm still not sold. There were some tone issues, a source to a metafilter post by a singular user (hardly an RS), and still most of the sources are primary. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 19:04, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Right now, the article looks even worse--it seems to be a collection of sample jokes. I don't see any notability established by these references at all. Drmies (talk) 03:52, 14 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- And yes, I did look through the list of "Rinkwork articles," and could not find anything that offered in-depth discussion. Mere mention is not enough. Drmies (talk) 03:55, 14 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete no reliable, non-trivial sources. -- samj _in ^out 16:23, 15 March 2009 (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.