Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mengjie

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. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 02:44, 1 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Mengjie

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I’m nominating this page for deletion today based primarily off of WP:GNG, lack of a coherent subject, and intractable WP:SYNTHESIS issues, the latter two of which can be folded into WP:TNT.

This is eligible for deletion under these criteria as this is not a disambiguation page; it is a anthroponymic set index list per MOS:DABNAME, and as such must follow GNG and WP:NLIST.

This fails NLIST on two counts; the first is that there is no substantial English-language coverage of the Mengjie given name. The second is that there is no one subject of Mengjie or of similar loci; this is why I discount any potential Chinese-language source.

The main problem here is that romanizations of Chinese do not have one-to-one correspondence with Chinese characters. Also, a particular romanization X may also appear in a different romanization, but instead representing a different sound; this is all before we take tones into account. We might also note that Chinese is not one language; it is better described as the Sinitic language family (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, etc.), and every character is pronounced differently and thus romanized differently even if the character itself is identical.

Mengs in Mandarin include, for example: 夢, 萌, 孟, 猛, and 蒙.

Mengs not restricted to Mandarin include 孟 (see above intersection) and 萬, romanized in Hanyu Pinyin as wan.

As another analog, take common Chinese surnames; note common overlap in the end state of romanizations between romanization systems (the most common now are Hanyu Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and postal) and different languages of Sinitic. Any original language discussion of a particular given name, even in Chinese, would then be conflated with every other possible combination of romanizations, characters, and languages that would result in Mengjie. It is a many-to-many correspondence.

As such, the content and premise of this page is a form of WP:SYNTHESIS. It combines multiple forms of two-character Chinese given names and all English Mengjie romanizations into one; reliable sources doing this do not exist so far as I can see.

The similarity in Hanyu Pinyin romanization is an effect of how words are pronounced in Mandarin. Categorizing them into one English romanization is akin to fitting a square peg into a round hole; this is before we get into tone differences, which change meanings in and of themselves.

There has been no previous project discussion on pages like this—given names with ambiguous romanizations and variations in English without one-to-one-correspondence—that I could find, and certainly not in WikiProject Anthroponymy or in Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/China- and Chinese-related articles.

I’ll then address the criteria laid out in WP:CSC, mentioned in WP:SIA as a guideline, itself a sub-guideline of WP:SAL, itself a guideline and of course subordinate to GNG. This list plainly fails the “every entry in the list fails the notability criteria” and “short, complete lists of every item that is verifiably a member of the group” criteria, so what remains is “every entry meets the notability criteria for its own article in the English Wikipedia.”

But then what is the list about? As established above, it’s about many things vaguely defined that don’t hold water in Sinitic or in English; they are not the same, and similarity occurs only in contrived English analogs.

The article in its current state shows the lack of focus. Every instance of Mengjie originates from different written characters. Mengjie itself is not and cannot be notable. The premise of this article is flawed; this article ought to be deleted. Iseult^Δxparlez moi 01:34, 24 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I’m not sure that’s a rationale for deletion. I think the relevant consideration is “what will English speakers search for/want to know?” So a good outcome would be to build the article out to explain that while there are a number of people with a name that sounds as though they're the same name, in fact they have different meanings. Mccapra (talk) 09:24, 24 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of China-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 11:59, 24 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. The first thing to understand is the relative commonality of surnames versus given names between the western world and East Asia. In the western world most given names are sourced from a relatively bounded set while surnames are more variant by orders of magnitude; in East Asia the situation is reversed, such that the vast majority of people share surnames from a small set while given names have almost no limit. Secondly, as the nom states, this is a romanisation of multiple possible combinations of Chinese characters (although they are not all different; at time of writing two of the three instances on the target page are romanisations of the same two graphs).
So while it might almost make sense for Wikipedia to have an article List of people named Emma, we would never consider it appropriate to have the article People whose surnames are pronounced /bæks/, to which the article under discussion is analogous. Folly Mox (talk) 12:58, 24 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I agree that this page is pretty useless as an encyclopedia article – there is not much to say about given names transliterated "Mengjie", both because they are a variety of given names with nothing to do with each other and because, as User:Folly Mox points out, Chinese given names vary widely and don't generally have history associated with them like English given names do. (There are exceptions; it's possible that Jianguo (given name) – 建国 – could support an article, and indeed it has one on the Chinese Wikipedia.)

So the only reason to keep this page would be to help with disambiguation. For surnames, that can sometimes be useful, because notable people are sometimes identified by their surname alone, making the surname a plausible search term for the article about the person. But Chinese given names are rarely used alone, except in informal situations, so it is hard to imagine that someone would search for "Mengjie" to find one of these people without knowing their surname. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 14:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Move to Mengjie (disambiguation). Total agreement that it's not notable but has some limited utility as a dab page for users who don't realize that Chinese names are family first. Matt's talk 16:06, 27 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Unlike western naming conventions, Chinese (and other East Asian) cultures generally don't name children after ancestors or famous people. People who share a given name like Mengjie were named so in coincedence, instead of choosing a name passed down in History. Chinese given names don't really need pages like this. Tutwakhamoe (talk) 18:26, 27 May 2023 (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.