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 No consensus (non-admin close) RMHED (talk) 19:19, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Contested PROD. Fails WP:WEB, a high Alexa ranking seems insufficient to establish notability. —Ashanda (talk) 15:09, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: Err ... just short of the top 500 in websites is damn near a prima facie determination of notability all by itself, quite aside from articles in the Stanford Daily, Penthouse, Marie Claire ... Ravenswing 15:40, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know about the high ranking, perhaps that should be added to WP:WEB? After shelling out $6, I found the Penthouse reference was actually an advertisement. The Marie Claire reference seems like a directory listing. The The Stanford Daily review is substantial for what it's worth being that it's a student newspaper. Even with these I'm still borderline on the subject's notability. —Ashanda (talk) 16:33, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I'm not seeing WP:N from WP:RS in the article, and I'm having a hard time digging through all the hits on search engines from sites that aren't reliable sources. porn sites of all sorts are notorious for being good at gaming things like alexa, SEO and linkfarming. If there are valid references, please add them to the article and I'll change my opinion. Wrs1864 (talk) 20:16, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Literotica has never been accused of such things to my knowledge. It is a porn site, and it covers its costs, but it doesn't spam. It's genuinely popular. --Dhartung | Talk 03:26, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I'm not saying that literotica has done those things, I have no evidence either way. It is just that the links I followed, and I dug around way too much, all offer trivial or incidental coverage, or are from sources that aren't considered reliable (blogs and such). If this was an article about some beetle or the history of a castle, I would be far more willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Please, if you can come up with reliable sources to back up the notability, please add them to make it easier to prove. Wrs1864 (talk) 12:09, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Weak delete. Even if there are scholarly sources, no one knows about them because they aren't in the article. Happyme22 (talk) 21:42, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
WP:N doesn't require that the sources establishing notability be included in the article (if it did, we'd be bringing half of wikipedia to AfD). It only requires that the sources exist. That's why AfD nominators should generally do at least a quick search for sources before nominating an article for deletion. Klausness (talk) 11:19, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I did so but was unable to find any non-trivial, third party coverage from reliable sources. The Stanford Daily hit that RGTraynor found above is the closest thing I've seen so far, but it's not enough to push me to the other side of the fence. —Ashanda (talk) 13:14, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I am not seeing any non-trivial coverage... [1]. This is a case where popularity doesn't apparently equate to Wikipedia-style notability, which is really more about the quality of reliable sources. --Rividian (talk) 23:42, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. In addition to the google scholar hits noted by Pburka, there are also plenty of google books hits. Klausness (talk) 11:25, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Simply an advertisment for a porn site. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cheekykidz (talk • contribs) 19:12, 26 May 2008 (UTC) — Cheekykidz (talk • contribs) has made NO other edits outside this topic. [reply]
Keep. It appears that the site provided the content for a book published in 2001 under ISBN 1892723093. That seems to be very notable. Vegaswikian (talk) 02:50, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Keep - I hadn't heard of this site before the AfD, which is perhaps unsurprising, but in looking into it I found a couple of things in its defense. The first, as Vegaswikian points out, is that at least one book has been published collecting stories from the site. The second is that it was a major source of material for Susanna Paasonen's paper "Strange bedfellows: Pornography, affect and feminist reading" in Feminist Theory, and it has been used as a source in a few other papers when required. I've also added some refs to the article from Jacob's Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics which has a bit of info on the site. None of these seem to me to be knock-down arguments for keeping, or even, for that matter, overly strong arguments, but I'm tending to lean in that direction. - Bilby (talk) 04:13, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I had already checked those. The "literotica" book mentioned by vegaswikian appears to be self-published and therefore counts neither toward being a reliable source nor notability. I checked the "strange bedfellows", but I can't access it to see if it is more than incidental coverage. The "netporn: DIY" book has excerpts on google books and from what I could see there, it was just incidental coverage. Again, I checked this stuff early on and haven't found good sources, but I have found a large number of vague/poor references. If this website is as popular as it appears to be, I would hope that someone would come forward and cut through the junk and give some good pointers. Wrs1864 (talk) 12:19, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment The publisher of Literotica is iffy - I've looked into it now that you pointed it out, and I agree with you. I don't think that the "Netporn: DIY" was incidental (although I can see an argument either way), but it is non-trivial. It was enough to provide some valid references. Most of the academic sources were certainly using Literotica as nothing more than a source - they tended to mention that it exists, or refer to one or two stories. However, the "Strange Bedfellows" was certainly non-trivial. It was looking at pornography, and used Literotica as one of the main sources. It wasn't positive, but then I didn't expect it to be. :) Finally, if it is of any help to the discussion, Literotica gets mentioned in a few rating (Nielson, Alta-Vista search terms), and it does seem to have evidence that it is (or at least was) very popular. To be honest, I don't think this is a clear keep by any means, and can understand votes either way. I'm just falling on the (very) weak keep side, based in part on the popularity and in part on the two real sources (Paasonen and Jacob). But if consensus is otherwise I'm comfortable with that. - Bilby (talk) 12:56, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per Ravenswing, Pburka, Klausness, Vegaswikian. Papa Lima Whiskey (talk) 13:22, 29 May 2008 (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.