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Trams in popular culture

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Trams in popular culture (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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This is effectively a list of works featuring trams plus random tram trivia. It includes works that mention trams even if said trams are not relevant to the story (ex. "The opening scene is set on W2 class tram 260") or "n the third of his Thomas Kell novels, A Divided Spy, Charles Cumming has a hitman arrive on a tram") or totally ridcolous trivia-level stuff like "Tramway, North Carolina, is an area of Lee County, North Carolina which politically forms part of Sanford." This is a terrible violation of WP:GNG, WP:NLIST, MOS:TRIVIA, WP:IPC and WP:NOTTVTROPES, in descending order of policy importance (WP:V too I guess, given lack of footnotes for most stuff here). I will note that AFAIK even TV Tropes itself doesn't have an entry for trams. Perhaps this could be transwikid to some tram fan wiki (https://trams.fandom.com/Tram ?), but it is certainly not encyclopedic type of content (obscure trivia and nothing but). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:11, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements, Popular culture, Transportation, and Lists. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:11, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete this is a WP:INDISCRIMINATE coatrack of original research; none of the sources provided actually describe "trams in popular culture" as a concept. Satellizer el Bridget 05:58, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
• Keep Yet another targeted assassination of a section hived of from the main article, justified by a scary bombardment of policy links with mostly no relevance at all. By no means all of it is obscure or trivial, though more refs would be nice. Johnbod (talk) 14:13, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
  • How do sources on the overarching topic—Trams in popular culture—treat it? TompaDompa (talk) 18:06, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete Potentially notable topic, but the actual content is just an example farm, so it passes WP:TNT threshold. It would only work if rewritten in prose format. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 14:44, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete - A cursory search on my part did not turn up any significant coverage on the overall topic of the depiction of trolleys or trams in pop culture or fiction, so I am not convinced the topic would actually pass the WP:GNG. And even if it did, this current article, a poorly sourced list of mostly trivial examples, would need to be removed so a proper article on the topic could be rewritten from the ground up. Rorshacma (talk) 15:10, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete does not pass WP:SIGCOV or WP:IINFO. Even if someone wanted to write a more encyclopedic entry about this topic, it would be best to write it as a section in the main article, with no reliable information to WP:PRESERVE from this article. Shooterwalker (talk) 00:14, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
  • This is exactly what was done! But then it was decided to move it off to here. The old deletionist two-step. Johnbod (talk) 18:19, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
    • Respectfully, when it was split the first revision of this article looked like this (and correspondingly, the last version of the main article before the section was moved looked like this). Clearly, the section was not constructed properly in the first place. TompaDompa (talk) 18:34, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

    Have you considered the possibility that there is no "deletionist conspiracy', and you're just utterly failing at WP:AGF? "Targeted assassination," really? Trainsandotherthings (talk) 19:55, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

• Delete - This article as it stands is basically a tram version of Internet Movie Car Database/ (just without the pictures). No evidence of any notability, Fails GNG. –Davey2010 15:28, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete even TV tropes would just consider this “people sit on chairs”. We are not the Internet Tram Enthusiast Database. Dronebogus (talk) 23:52, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete I'll say the same thing I said at WP:Articles for deletion/Tonfa in popular culture: Listing every time X appears in fiction (or popular culture, or whatever) is what TV Tropes does, but Misplaced Pages is WP:NOTTVTROPES. The essay WP:CARGO has it right—fiction is not fact and collecting raw data does not produce analysis. That same essay makes another point which is relevant here: Moving bad content into a separate standalone article does not get rid of the bad content; wanting to keep the main article "clean" is not a valid reason for having an article like this one. If editors add examples to the main Tram article based on primary sources (or more likely no sources whatsoever), the proper course of action is to remove those examples per MOS:POPCULT.I would have no objection to recreating this as a proper, encyclopaedic prose article about the topic—as was done for WP:Articles for deletion/Far future in fiction—in the event that sources that would allow us to do that while abiding by MOS:POPCULT emerge. None of the current content would be of any use for that, however, so there's no point in retaining this version. TompaDompa (talk) 01:13, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
• Keep - this page offers information on a large number of subjects and, thus, makes a major contribution! If anything, it should be returned to its original place on the Tram page.Albert Isaacs (talk) 06:20, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

  I have no idea how “it covers a large number of subjects” constitutes a keep argument. In any case you’re really just suggesting a merge, which is completely different. Dronebogus (talk) 09:08, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

  See WP:ITSUSEFUL/WP:ITSINTERESTING... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:15, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

• Keep - I suggest restricting the page just to famous people who were keen on trams. This will keep the page to a manageable size.106.69.211.40 (talk) 07:32, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

  What? Why? This isn’t “list of famous people who were keen on trams”. Write that article if sources exist, but please don’t WP:COATRACK it onto an existing one because it works if you squint real hard. Dronebogus (talk) 09:03, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

• Keep this legitimate SPINOUT of trams. Frequent discussions of spinoffs and spinouts undermine the WP general structure, could make people hesitant to limit articles in size, and take valuable sources away from the article space, where our contributions matter the most. No objections to merging back, if a must to keep this content. Just really bad if this is where we come to. gidonb (talk) 12:46, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
  • No, it is not a legitimate spinout. It's a mess of content that lacks proper sourcing. The problem isn't that people are hesitant to limit articles in size, but that they think that moving the content that needs to go to a new article somehow solves anything. If this content had simply been removed from the main article in the first place, the problem would have been solved. See my comment above on the essay WP:CARGO and other things. TompaDompa (talk) 12:52, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

    As I said, if a must it can be moved back. Not my preference. Plus individual items need to be sourced. Then again AFDISNOTCLEANUP. We have too many and too long AfD debates. Not enough work is done in the article space. If something needs to be improved, this can be discussed on the talk page. gidonb (talk) 13:11, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

    This cannot be improved, because it wasn't constructed even semi-properly in the first place. It would have to be replaced entirely. There is no content here to merge, for if the article were cleaned up, nothing would remain. We certainly have articles of similar scopes that are constructed properly—I have personally done that to e.g. Battle of Thermopylae in popular culture and Loch Ness Monster in popular culture during the course of their respective AfDs ()—but this is not. The key issue is not that individual items need to be sourced but that the overarching topic—Trams in popular culture—needs to be. TompaDompa (talk) 13:17, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

    Trams are a major mode of transportation. We should not underestimate their cultural significance. Outcomes of fantasy are both irrelevant and circular reasoning. gidonb (talk) 13:21, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

    No, we shouldn't underestimate the cultural significance of trams. But we also cannot, per Misplaced Pages's WP:Core content policies create that significance ourselves or decide what it is by way of WP:Original research. We have to let the sources do that for us—what do sources say the cultural significance of trams is? What sources on the overarching topic of Trams in popular culture are there even? Surely you understand that the entirety of this article is an exercise in original research, proclaiming that this is the cultural significance of trams in the absence of reliable and relevant external sources saying so?I shouldn't have to explain this to you—you're a very experienced editor—but articles need to be based on sources on the topic of the article (in this case Trams in popular culture). If those sources do not exist, the article likewise cannot. Some things appear frequently in culture without having been analysed in that capacity by relevant sources—I doubt if there are sufficient sources analysing the role chairs play in culture to write a Chairs in popular culture article, for instance. Other things that appear somewhat frequently in culture do actually receive that kind of analysis from relevant sources. If you'll excuse the shameless self-promotion, Misplaced Pages has to the best of my knowledge only ever had a single piece of WP:Featured content about X in fiction/popular culture/whatever: Mars in fiction, a WP:Featured article that I worked on, which was promoted less than a month ago. The reason that was possible is that there are actually high-quality sources on the overarching topic (Robert Crossley's Imagining Mars: A Literary History and Robert Markley's Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination, to name just two). This is all to say that there is a known way to construct proper articles on topics like this, but it requires actually doing the legwork of locating sources doing the analysis and summarizing it in our own words (as with every other article on Misplaced Pages), not just collating raw data from WP:PRIMARY sources and calling it a day—the latter being in violation of policy, as this article is. This is not some revolutionary new idea, either—Uncle G wrote the essay WP:CARGO which outlines all of this back in 2008, fifteen years ago. TompaDompa (talk) 13:37, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

    Air in popualr culture... Grass in popular culture... People in popular culture... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:16, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

    More seriously, I expect we could write a good article on cars in popular culture. Wait, we actually have a decent one. And lo and behold, it's decent because it is not a list of random works featuring cars but a sourced, prose-style analysis of the phenomana. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:18, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

    • No that is correctly titled Effects of the car on societies, something totally different. It has an almost all-American section supposedly on Cars in popular culture, though much of it isn't. I contest it is "decent". Johnbod (talk) 03:03, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

• Delete. Total WP:LISTCRUFT. Full of indiscriminate examples and original research. Ajf773 (talk) 10:15, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete Misplaced Pages is not a repository of every time a tram or streetcar appeared in any sort of book or movie. The few encyclopedically notable instances can be mentioned in the tram article; 90% of what's in this spinoff is pointless trivia. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 02:48, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete as WP:INDISCRIMINATE and failing WP:NLIST, as I can't find any sources about the topic of the article (that being "Trams in popular culture", not "Trams", per WP:NOTINHERITED). Cakelot1 ☞️ talk 16:49, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz 04:39, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

• Keep per discussion and a look at the page which covers a major historical topic. This list was a part of another page and split, only to come to AfD to be deleted? Not the way things should be done here as it was on the other article and not removed, so if this is "deleted" please return the text to its original page. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:56, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
  • You are correct that this is not the way things should be done—this should never have been created in the first place. We are stuck trying to undo an error made 3 years ago when an unwillingness to outright remove content without proper sourcing resulted in the creation of this article to sequester it outside of the main article.You say that this is a major historical topic. I challenge you to provide sources on the overarching topic—Trams in popular culture—to back that up. So far, nobody arguing for keeping the article has been able to present anything that would go towards establishing WP:Notability. TompaDompa (talk) 10:16, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
    • This, exactly. The problem here, and in many of these "in popular culture" spinout lists, is that when editors realized that the content should not be in an article, it should have just been removed from the article. Instead, the problem was just kicked down the road by simply moving it, which does not actually solve the problem, so here we are several years later with an AFD. Rorshacma (talk) 18:31, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
• Comment this AfD is a mess because people are getting confused about why this list exists. There are two different reasons for budding off an article of this sort: (1) the topic is notable, sources discussing it independently; (2) some other article on a notable topic had a subsection that got too big. Many delete-voters here are deleting on the basis that the topic isn't discussed as a subject in sources, which is true. But our article on Trams has no "in popular culture" section because the section got too big and was split out to here. So really we're in a cat-flap situation (the cat that is In wants to be Out, while the cat that is Out wants to be In...). The cat can go out of the cat-flap by deleting this article and recreating an in-popular-culture section in Tram, and then that section will be too big, so it will have to be split out, and the cat will want to come back in again. Ultimately this is a clean-up situation, not really a deletion. The objection to the list is it contains a load of really tenuous stuff that shouldn't be there, and the same objection will exist if it's merged. So really, we would be spending our time better if we started to sort out the material rather than debating where to put it, as a whole. Elemimele (talk) 06:09, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

  The error was made at the start: instead of splitting off uncited and incongruous information to a new page, it should've been trimmed out. The "in fiction/culture" section wouldn't be this big if it contained 18 entries. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 08:11, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

  To add to this, not a single entry on the list has an appropriate source. Cleaning this up would thus be indistinguishable from deleting it—there would be nothing left. This should be obvious to anybody who has ever written a proper article on a topic like this. TompaDompa (talk) 10:16, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

• Delete - even if this didn't just read as a list of tram sightings without much substance, the fact that most of the facts listed in the article are completely uncited is a bad sign. If a good article on this topic is possible, I very highly doubt this version of the article has much worth salvaging. Remagoxer (talk) 11:26, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
• Delete This shouldn't be this hard. The article is mostly unsourced, the few sources that do exist are incidental mentions, there's a citation to someone's resume, precisely zero analysis or thematic coherence is presented, let alone cited, and it's full of unencyclopedic cruft like "it's just one block from Southern Cross railway station." Come on. As others have said, if anyone has reliable sources that talk about trams' relevance in mass culture, present them. I don't see a single one. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 14:59, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
• Comment I'm far from convinced that Trams feature sufficiently in popular culture to justify this article or a substantial section in Tram, but I'm completely, utterly, gobsmacked how many people can keep a straight face and say that there isn't a single referenced source about trams in mass culture, in the face of A Streetcar Named Desire, the most famous play of probably the most famous US playwright, one of the most performed plays ever written, adapted for film, opera, ballet and TV, and written about extensively - and clearly using a tram motif at some level. I mean, yes, the tram's not super-critical to the plot, but if it were really so incidental, the makers of the 1951 film could have rebranded it as "A bus service named desire", but they didn't. I don't care whether this article is kept, deleted, merged or whatever but let's at least acknowledge that there is one notable instance of trams in popular culture with strong sourcing. Elemimele (talk) 16:22, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

• Comment - There is a big difference between a specific instance of a notable example, and the topic, as a whole, being notable. Per WP:LISTN, for a stand alone list, there must be sources that discuss the topic, in this case "trams in popular culture", as a group or set, and that is the argument that is being made here. I don't think that anyone has said that there is absolutely no notable example of a tram in a piece of popular culture, and a few comments have even mentioned that any truly notable example should be described on the main article. Its the lack of reliable sources that discuss "trams in popular culture" as a group or set that is missing here. Rorshacma (talk) 18:31, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

  That's the whole point, Rorshacma, this was never intended as a notable-topic article, it was only ever an overflow from Tram, in the same way that we move a singer's discography out when it gets too big. We do this even if no one has ever written about the singer's discography as a subject. But in this case it was a mess before it was moved out, and therefore remains a mess now. It should have remained in Tram as a "Trams in popular culture" section but been trimmed only to those instances that are genuinely writtten-about as trams in media that count as popular culture. And if that means only a streetcar named desire (which will be a very short mention as we have a full article for those who are interested) then so be it. Elemimele (talk) 10:24, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

  Per WP:CONTENTSPLIT and WP:INDISCRIMINATE some overflow is just useless or harmful for an encyclopedia. WP:NOTTVTROPES, etc. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:38, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

• As mentioned above, the proper action would have been to just remove the section entirely from the parent article. Even if there are truly notable examples, the sourcing and format of the "in popular culture" section of the article before the split was entirely improper and lists of trivia of this kind are discouraged by the WP:MOS. Trimming would not have solved the issue, the entire section needed to have been removed and, if properly sourced, rewritten from scratch. But, instead it was just moved so we wound up with a terribly sourced list of trivia on a subject that does not pass the notability guidelines for stand alone lists that we have to deal with now. Even the singular example of A Streetcar Named Desire listed here does not actually contain any kind of sourced information - it is literally just "this thing exists" mentioned three times. That kind of content would have been useless to keep in the article after a trim, and would be useless to try to merge back now. Any kind of genuine coverage on the topic in the main Tram article will need to be created from scratch, not taken from this. Rorshacma (talk) 14:47, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

• Merge and redirect with Tram. Some of this content might do for an "in popular culture" section. Also, agree with Rorschacma above. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:49, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
• Merge per above. XtraJovial (talk • contribs) 02:23, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
  • I don't understand what content you want to merge. If we had any properly-sourced content to merge, we would have the beginnings of a proper article—but we don't. TompaDompa (talk) 08:27, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

    I haven't picked it out yet. I'd say there's a level of subjectivity here. While of course a film or movie or book reviewer commenting on the importance or symbolism of the tram in whichever work of art would be best, it's not impossible that the work itself could stand. For example, the streetcars in Who Framed Roger Rabbit are a plot point, part of the villain's motives, but the fact that they are streetcars and not something else isn't. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:49, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

    Hey, WFRR is even in there. Off the top of my head, the trolley in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood is one I'd pick. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:52, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

  • Keep This is a useful page detailing a single source summary of trams/streetcars in the context of popular culture, being film, novel or other media. This provides useful reference for research for those interested in popular culture relating to the tram/streetcar. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stephencward (talk • contribs) 01:51, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

    Hi there, I understand you’re a new editor, but WP:USEFUL is one of the Misplaced Pages:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions. Also, please sign your comments by typing four ~ after you’re done commenting. Dronebogus (talk) 11:42, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

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