Wiki143:Articles for deletion/There is a sucker born every minute

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 of the debate was NO CONSENSUS.

Final tally at closing was:

• 7 Keep (including rename to There's a sucker born every minute)
• 0 Delete
• 9 Merge with P. T. Barnum
• 1 Redirect to P. T. Barnum

No anon/socks to discar. Owen× ☎ 22:00, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

There is a sucker born every minute

Unencyclopedic entry based almost entirely on speculation; the article basically says that the phrase exists, may or may not be attributable to three different people and was once paraphrased by a theatre group. Delete CLW 12:33, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Further to discussion below, merge to P. T. Barnum and redirect both this and There's a sucker born every minute (surely the more common form) to P. T. Barnum. CLW 07:05, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

• comment - I am putting this up near the top, because people aren't reading the whole discussion. There are zero credible sources that claim Barnum ever uttered this phrase.
• I'm compelled to say merge and redirect to P. T. Barnum, because the phrase is ubiquitously associated with him, and any evidence disputing the belief that P.T. coined the phrase would best be documented there, as the other "possible coiners" appear to be non-notable red links. — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 13:45, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect to P.T. Barnum as mentioned above. PJM 14:09, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
• Merge: although a quote is not encylopedic, there seems to be some content on the page, but it belongs on the P.T. Barnum page. Once merged, I don't think a redirect is needed. Turnstep 14:49, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
• Keep based on the talk below. The phrase certainly is notable enough (especially the fact of its wide misattribution) to have its own page. Turnstep 21:47, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
• Merge per above. This is not so much a catchphrase as it is a notable quote attributed to one person, so it should be there. Incidentally, I thought the quote was "There's a sucker..." not "There is a sucker..." 23skidoo 15:29, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Ok, then... move this page to "There's a sucker born every minute" (squashing the existing redirect), then merge it to P. T. Barnum, then fix the resulting double redirect at the non-contracted title, and we should all be happy? — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 15:35, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
• keep: Disclaimer, I started this article.
  • When I started the article I did link to one of my sources, which, unfortunately, subsequent editors seem to have removed. So, the article is not really "based on speculation" as nominator asserts.
  • Can someone please explain what possible advantage a merge offers?
  • There are four articles that link to this article. Three of those article already link to PT Barnum. Readers who read those articles, and decide they want to know about Barnum can follow those links. Readers who want to know about the famous phrase, can follow that link.
  • The phrase is famous, whoever first coined it, famous enough it is part of our cultural short-hand. As such it merits an article of its own. The phrase nets over 50,000 google hits.
  • If this material, which I consider important, is merged into the PT Barnum article, someone can come along, and make the decision to delete it, without realizing that will damage the value of other articles. If it is left in article of its own, future nominators can check to see if other articles link to it. I will suggest to CLW that this should be part of their checklist if they make future {afd} nominations. -- Geo Swan 17:25, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Possibly the strongest argument as to why the phrase merits an article of its own, rather than a redirection to PT Barnum, is the frequency with which the phrase is used, without explanation, or reference to Barnum. Here are a handful of examples:
  1. STREET LIFE: There's a Sucker Born Every Minute, Fortune (magazine)
  2. SLI and CrossFire: There's a Sucker Born Every Minute, EDN: voice of the electronics engineer, September 16, 2005
  3. JOHN L. SMITH: There's a sucker born every minute, and that's not what Jesus taught, Las Vegas Review Journal, October 20, 2005
  4. There's a sucker born every minute, Pop culture (magazine), November 24, 2003
  5. Sour Grapes: At Tony's Wine Warehouse, there's a sucker born every minute, Dallas Observer, November 10, 2005
  6. There's a Sucker Born Every Minute, Boston Globe, September 1, 2005
  7. There's a Sucker Born Every Minute, G4TV, July 27, 1998
  8. Take a billionaire to lunch: The real reasons why Microsoft is so desperate to fold Internet Explorer into Windows 98, PBS, November 17, 2005
  9. China: "There's a sucker born every minute!", The Harbus Online, February 18, 2003

• Merge and redirect to P.T. Barnum. Interesting material, but individual quotes don't deserve their own articles. — JIP | Talk 18:31, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
• Redirect to P.T. Barnum. Firebug 18:42, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
• Merge to PT Barnum, where it has a definite place. The only thing that would not survive the move is the link to Firesign Theatre, which I'd excise anyway as there is no real evidence that this particular paraphrase (of the many hundreds which surely exist) is especially notable. Strangely that was part of the orignal content of the page by User:Geo Swan, editor on the Firesign article and creator of one Firesign-related one. I must go and do something else for a while, I keep having these unworthy thoughts about the motives of my fellow Wikipedians. Just zis  Guy, you know? ^[T]/_[C] (W) AfD? 19:51, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
• Merge and Redirect to P.T. Barnum as quotes are from this person anyway. MONGO 20:06, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
  • (Sigh) One of the main points of the article is that Barnum is not the creator of the phrase. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geo Swan (talk • contribs) 15:28, November 27, 2005
    • The fact is, most people attribute the phrase to P. T. Barnum, correctly or otherwise, and it's listed in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations under his name. If there is credible evidence that the origin is disputed, this should be explained as neutrally as possible, at the P. T. Barnum page. — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 20:42, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
      • If you pay a visit to the Bartlett page for this quote I think you will agree it makes clear Barnum never uttered the phrase. You won't find a single credible source that claims he did say it. -- Geo Swan 11:35, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
        • But, as I said, it is listed with his name—"ATTRIBUTION: Phineas Barnum (1810–1891), U.S. showman. Attributed," with a neutral disclaimer—we should follow suit. — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 11:42, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
• Request: As a courtesy to me would someone explain why merging and redirecting makes sense? I am serious. I recognize some of your names as regular patrollers of {afd}. I think I am missing something. It seems to me that there are some shared assumptions that you regular patrollers of {afd} all share, and don't realize the rest of us aren't aware of. Is there a reason why one big article is better than several smaller related articles? If this is explained in some wiki policy document? -- Geo Swan 20:21, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Because stub-sorting is a pain in the buttocks, because quality of articles is more important than quantity, and because when a new user enters something in the search box or clicks the Random Page link and gets fed an article consisting of only a few sentences, it reflects poorly upon the encyclopedia as a whole. Or, well, that's my opinion anyway. Hey, I just discovered I'm a mergist.— FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 20:36, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

LOL! Welcome to the club. May I just take a moment to clarify: when I said that the fact of Geo Swan's having created another Firesign-related article was an unworthy thought, I meant exactly that. His edit history makes it abundantly clear that he is not a single-issue wonder, but an editor with a wide history of interesting added content. I know I am sometimes prone to irony - Geo Swan, please accept my apologies if the comment was misread in any way, I was actually having a go at myself, not at you. Honest. - Just zis  Guy, you know? ^[T]/_[C] (W) AfD? 21:17, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

• • • Freak of Nature, thanks for offering your explanation. I don't know what "sub-sorting" is. But, it seems to me that your concern about new users being turned off, when they click on the Random Page link, merely reveals a flaw in the implementation of the Random Page code -- one that could be fixed with a sensibility filter that didn't show pages that fell below a certain threshold of edits or sentences. WRT new users please consider the comment I posted to Dalbury's vote below, where I suggest thought experiment. If you are going to base your vote based on new users I think you have to consider the frustration and inconvenience a merge poses for readers who go to the page because they want to know the background of the phrase, and, instead, are taken to a completely different page, a biography, or someone they may never heard of. -- Geo Swan 11:35, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
      • Stub-sorting. I didn't notice the typo. Sorry. — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 13:50, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
• The fact that the phrase is often used without attribution is pretty irrelevant. "To be or not to be" is often used without attribution, but it still belongs to Shakespeare. That said, if there's serious dispute about the source of the phrase, Keep but move to There's a sucker... —Wahoofive (talk)
• Keep. The merge votes, I think, are a little rediculous in this case. Sure, the fact that PT Barnum didn't actually say it would stay on his page, but the other people would be deleted as irrelevent on that page. So it needs to stay here. Jacqui^★ 00:43, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

• Speaking for myself, I vote merge because the phrase is popularly attributed to Barnum, and the history of the phrase is inextricably linked to him (an early example of a snow-job, I guess). - Just zis  Guy, you know? ^[T]/_[C] (W) AfD? 10:22, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

• Keep as per Jacqui. Seano1 01:40, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
• Merge to the Barnum article. Sheesh, do we need an article for every quote that may have been misattributed? -- Dalbury^(Talk) 02:12, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
  • That is a strawman argument. No one is suggesting that every misattributed quote merits an article of its own. The phrase merits an article because it is widely used, and has long ago entered our cultural shorthand. Most instances of its use don't explain its meaning, or attribute it to Barnum. The wikipedia should have an article devoted to the phrase to help out those unfamiliar with the phrase, or those for whom English is not their native language. Merging to Barnum is a disservice to those who want to use the wikipedia to find out the phrase's background. Here is a thought experiment. Go to one of the articles that links to this one. Pretend you have never heard of Barnum. Now pretend you clicked on the link, because you were interested in the phrase, and you got taken not to an article about the phrase, but to some guy from the 19th Century named Barnum. Let me suggest that, if you were a new user, your first reaction would be, "This wikipedia is not as useful as people claim. WTF would it take me to a biography of this 19th Century guy, when I told it I wanted to know more about that phrase?" -- Geo Swan 11:35, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect to Barnum. Do we really need articles for every famous quote? Sorry for my language now, I am just making a point: The quote "Fuck you" is a much more used quote than the Barnum quote, but it isn't an article of itself, but redirected and a part of the article "Fuck". By the way, the Barnum quote should be listed as "trivia" in the Barnum article since it is uncertain whether he said it. My Regards, Dna-Dennis ^{talk - contribs} 12:17, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
• comment - I want to address those of you who identify yourselves as "mergists". I understand that some of you feel an aesthetic affinity to merging. I get aesthetic affinities too. I get aesthetic affinities for doing things certain ways, or making things look in certain ways. But, what I have to acknowledge, is that those aesthetic affinities sometimes screw me up.

It seems like most people who want to merge this article into PT Barnum are prompted by an aesthetic sense. The merge feels right to them, because all merge suggestions feel right to them.

Some instances of making things look right really are incredibly useful and important. An instance of that here on the wikipedia would be we the see also and external references sections. There is a project to go through all the articles and regularize their usage. Making all our external references appear as regular as possible, makes it easy to find the particular parts we want. With instances like this, once we get used to putting things in a regular format, we internalize that format, so we can recognize it at a glance, and can recognize when it is not in that format, at a glance. And our aesthetic sense kicks in, so we feel dissatisfied when it just doesn't look right.

But that aesthetic sense can really betray us too, lead us into bad decisions. There are certain kinds of tasks where I am tempted to use my favourite tools. I want to write a script, make use of some regular expressions, to automatically select some stuff, and make transformations. I think I am good at it. I estimate it won't take very long, and I will feel an aesthetic satisfaction doing the task that I wouldn't feel if I made each change by hand. But it turns out I made some typos, or didn't fully appreciate the special cases, and I have to write several drafts. I find myself reluctant to admit when my aesthetic sense betrayed me -- when brute force manual editing would have saved time and prevented errors.

We have to be disciplined about how we allow ourselves to exercise our aesthetic sense. We have to recognize that even the best aesthetic rule, which

Merging can break things. It will break things in this particular instance. Three of the four articles that link to this article already link to PT Barnum, right in the same sentence or a neighbouring sentence. So, redirecting this phrase to PT Barnum breaks those articles, by putting a second, deceptive link to PT Barnum near the real link to PT Barnum.

That sucks. Its broken. Let me suggest this merge is a misapplication of your aesthetic sense. -- Geo Swan 12:20, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

• • Geo, here is how I see it: people will go to the Barnum article and expect to find reference to this comment, due to widespread popular (mis?)attribution. Note that the references are not actually conclusive on that score. Therefore, the Barnum article has to mention this phrase, even if only to say he never said it. It would make sense to cover it twice if (a) there was a substantial likelihood of people entering this phrase as a search term (which I don't think there is, and anyway the search would find the Barnum article), or (b) there was substantial additional encyclopaedic content, which I don't see: beyond Barnum-specific discussion (which again ionvolves redundancy as it has to establish the background of the quarrel, which is properly done in the Barnum article), there isn't much to say. It's an aphorism, people use it. This is not a dictionary of aphorisms. If there is a list of aphorisms it would probably be listed (as it is in my dictionary of aphorisms) as widely but probably erroneously attributed to Barnum. You've seen what Bartleby has to say: [1]. So, I support a merge for maintainability, avoiding duplication, and ease of use because I can't see what other encyclopaedic relevance it might have, this not being a dictionary of aphorisms and all. - Just zis  Guy, you know? ^[T]/_[C] (W) AfD? 12:29, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. The phrase has independent significance above and beyond the Barnum article and discussion about its origins deserve a separate entry. Jtmichcock 05:38, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
• Keep/Rename. I was in the process of closing out this AfD when I came to the conclusion that I so strongly disagreed with what appeared to be the majority opinion that I'd rather express my own opinion and let somebody else close it out. Given how popular the phrase is, and how it appears that Barnum did not actually say it (which I've heard before), I think it deserves to stand on its own. The Barnum article should reference this one. Rename to There's a sucker born every minute (as mentioned above, the most common form), and redirect this name (as a common mis-spelling) to that one. --RoySmith 14:46, 3 December 2005 (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.