Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Salt spoon (unit)

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. Consensus is that we don't want these as separate articles. Whether these units would be appropriate as content in some list, and based on which sources, is a separate editorial question. The source cited in all of these, contested by some as unreliable, is: Cardarelli, F. (2003). Encyclopaedia of Scientific Units, Weights and Measures. Their SI Equivalences and Origins. London: Springer. p. 50. ISBN 978-1-4471-1122-1. Sandstein 11:52, 3 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Salt spoon (unit)[edit]

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Fails WP:GNG. Wikipedia is not a cookbook or dictionary directory. No significant coverage (news search) and only one given source, which has questionable reliability. One may argue for WP:THEREMUSTBESOURCES, but I can't find any. — kikichugirl ^speak up! 03:13, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Kikichugirl: This article consists unit conversions and the definition based on the based unit for US unit of capacity used in food recipe and the usage and also it includes references while providing the fact that this article is differed from an dictionary entry. Wikipeadia also includes articles for other units of US unit of capacity used in food recipe, including drop, tea spoon, tablespoon, etc. Before doubting the reliability of the source, all the references in the bibliography list must be pursued properly. Articles which can be enhanced by other authors in future and which enhance the knowledge base of Wikipedia, should not be nominated for deletion. Shevonsilva (talk) 03:32, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

— Note to closing admin: Shevonsilva (talk • contribs) is the creator of the page that is the subject of this XfD. — kikichugirl ^speak up! 03:36, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I am also BOLDly nominating the following related pages (cooking measurements) for the same reason:

All are non-notable dicdef units of measurements not likely to be more than a permastub. — kikichugirl ^speak up! 03:36, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comment "all the references in the bibliography list"? I only see one. It may be a perfectly good reference, but one reference does not a notable topic make (it needs significant coverage). Also see WP:OTHERSTUFF -- units of measurement have varying degrees of notability, just like everything else. Finally, just because someone could come along and improve an article doesn't mean they will; and "enhancing the knowledge base" alone is not a factor. Sorry. ekips 39 04:12, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Kikichugirl:

I have mentioned you in Administrative board for recommending to delete proper articles like Dash also. You are basically discouraging the expansion of Wikipeadia by not referring the reliable sources properly.

For your question of references, my explanation was related to the source which meant the book which was in the reference list of the article. So, all the references in the bibliography list mean all the references in the bibliography list in the book.

Including missing units in Wikipeadia is a contribution for it enhancement. If it is not done by me, it will be done by someone else in a long future.

Shevonsilva (talk) 04:36, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(I have indented your comments to align) I know you mean well, but Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and "proper articles" are articles that meet notability guidelines. The source currently listed is under debate by multiple editors. I cannot decide they are bad, nor can you, at least not unilaterally - the community decides. This is where it happens. I am nominating them for deletion, not deleting them. Please avoid accusing me of "discouraging the expansion of wikipedia" - I am not a robot who !votes 'delete' on every single article. — kikichugirl ^speak up! 04:57, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Shevonsilva, please understand that you created all of these while the community was giving you clear messages that you ought to stop and discuss whether or not they should be created in the first place. Also, please consider the value of these as standalone articles. I understand your desire to have them represented somewhere at Wikipedia, but maybe a List of XXXX article would be best. Let's ping User:Northamerica1000. He's wise and does a lot of food and drink work. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 05:07, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Kikichugirl: Very sorry if I made you upset by saying so. I really worried about your nominations for deletion. People may search for these units to understand the meanings and specially for unit conversions (for example, while referring a cookbook [if these are not available here, they will loose the trust on coverage of Wikipedia and will go for other encyclopaedias]). What I am doing here is at least, try to start to fill gaps in Wikipedia. I need authors who can further enhance my articles by adding more reliable sources. Expect your support too. Shevonsilva (talk) 05:10, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Will you do me a favor and stop using the {{ping}} template? It's a large number of notifications from you in the same time (and yet with all those notifications, you failed to notify me of my ANI...). As for your reply, unfortunately, I'd have to disagree. Permastubs are possible permastubs for a reason - they are not Notable. See WP:BURDEN and WP:What Wikipedia is not. If you think there are other sources (see my nom: WP:THEREMUSTBESOURCES) then feel free to add them. Many people !vote keep with no intention to fix the article. — kikichugirl ^speak up! 05:16, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comment You might want to toss a few of these into List of unusual units of measurement. There is also Units of measurement, and maybe start List of culinary units of measurement. Just a thought. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 04:47, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Scratch that. I see Cooking weights and measures exists. Maybe some items could get listed there. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 09:43, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Kikichugirl: Yes, in a very later process, I am planning to create unit systems articles separately to increase the understandability of the unit systems at once too. Shevonsilva (talk) 05:13, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all This does not seem encyclopedic at all, closer to wp:DICTIONARY type material. Delete the individual articles with no prejudice for adding the information to articles about measurements or lists of measurements.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 05:15, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Maunus: This article is not a dictionary entry as it covers more information than usage of information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations and translation. This article covers direct definitions from the base units, and convertion from the unit system and SI units too. This article can be further improved by other authors in future. Author must try to enhance the knowledge-base of Wikipeadia rather than recommending the existing articles without being improving it further. Through that process, people will go for some other knowledge base. Shevonsilva (talk) 05:46, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Actually it is less than a dictionary entry because it doesnt carry any of those kinds of information only the conversion measure. This does not improve a knowledge base, just waste bandwidth.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 06:29, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Delete the lot - I appreciate the creator may have taken some time in creating these but We ain't a dictionary site, I personally see no point to these but anyway these belong on WikiDictionary. –Davey2010 ^{Merry Xmas / Happy New Year} 05:21, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Davey2010: This article is not a dictionary entry as it covers more information than usage of information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations and translation. This article covers direct definitions from the base units, and convertion from the unit system and SI units too. This article should not be in WikiDictionary as this article provides more additional information that dictionary entry. This article can be further improved by other authors in future. Author must try to enhance the knowledge-base of Wikipeadia rather than recommending the existing articles without being improving it further. Through that process, people will go for some other knowledge base. Shevonsilva (talk) 05:46, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all per WP:NOTDICTIONARY. All these articles are based on a single table titled "US units of capacity used in food recipes" in the sample chapter on page 31 of the PDF. The table just shows things like "1 breakfast cup ≡ 10 fluid ounce". If encyclopedic information about these units is ever discovered, someone can create a new article. Johnuniq (talk) 06:25, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
~~Delete all~~ per WP:NOTDICTIONARY. -- Hoary (talk) 08:45, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They're all deletable per WP:NOTDICTIONARY; but Dash (unit) has so great a potential for comedy (see below) that it must be kept. Delete all except Dash (unit); mount Dash (unit) on a pedestal and fatten it up with great grosses of, erm, independent sources. -- Hoary (talk) 02:36, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all. Take your choice: notdictionary, indiscriminate, or the GNG. These clearly don't belong here, but they could conceivably be mentioned in a list article. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 10:59, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all: although I have improved the article Dash (unit) because I couldn't bear to see such rubbish standing in the encyclopedia, I'd rather see it all gone, or perhaps redirected to an article such as Cooking weights and measures. PamD 11:34, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Keep/merge These all seem to be valid. If they should be too slight to stand by themselves then, per our editing policy, we should merge them into the more general compilation, cooking weights and measures, as suggested above. Andrew D. (talk) 12:28, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that not only were these old definitions very fluid, but in these articles they're all based on one source, which means they may not be reliable. For example, a quick Google search reveals no less than three definitions of "wine glassful", none of which are the same as this article. Meanwhile "Water glassful" simply appears to be equivalent to a (US) pint. Incidentally, the source is online here. Black Kite (talk) 23:05, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I did my Christmas shopping at a chandler where I picked up a copy of Pocket Ref - an interesting compendium which I'd not seen before. That has an extensive list of conversion tables too. It's for handymen more than cooks but still has lots of culinary units like the teaspoon, the drop and the pinch. It has at least one of the units listed for deletion above - the teacupful, which it calls the cup, tea. It has this as 142 ml rather than 147 but it's not surprising that there's some variation as many units vary, depending on the place or the context - it has five different versions of the horsepower, for example. So, while we're at the margin here, it still seems that rushing to delete is contrary to our editing policy and is more of a dogpile than cool consideration. Andrew D. (talk) 10:19, 27 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See also: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/UKline. -- Hoary (talk) 12:53, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete All - At best, these are dictionary definitions, which is something WP is not. Carrite (talk) 15:14, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:12, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:25, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Food and drink-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:25, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all unexpandable dicdef at best, ridiculous trivia at worst. Not absolutely every thing that could possibly be looked up in any book ever needs to have a Wikipedia article. Additionally, dragging Kikichugirl to ANI for "discouraging the expansion of wikipedia" (whatever that even means) is totally unacceptable. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 19:32, 26 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all. The only way we could make these units in any way consistent would be to cherry pick sources. Given that sources do not agree on these units I don't think they are really units. It is original research to turn colloquial loose amounts into fixed ratio units unless there is clear agreement among multiple reliable sources. Chillum 00:12, 27 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all At best these are approximations, if anyone really uses them for anything (except dash, which I use, but there is no measurement for that. Legacypac (talk) 05:17, 28 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

One might think that the length of typographical dashes was unimportant but, as we know, there are lots of editors who fuss about the differences between the en-dash, the em-dash and the hyphen. So, it is no surprise to find that there are people out there who care about the size of a culinary dash. See How much is a dash? for an interesting discussion of this. That discussion gives some precise definitions and sources and so, by following those up, we could make more of this topic. Such details can be quite significant -- I quite like the anecdote that the sales of Angostura bitters went up by 30% when they increased the size of the hole in the top of the bottle. One can confirm that cocktail mixers really care about this in sources such as Bitters: A Spirited History. A little more browsing and I soon find a medical source which covers this too, as such domestic measures are common used for dispensing medicine. Simply hand-waving this away on the basis of personal experience and opinion is quite wrong because we are not here to engage in original research but should be summarising what all these independent sources say. Andrew D. (talk) 11:17, 28 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I know that I wrote earlier that the whole lot should be deleted, but now that you bring my attention to it, I do have a soft spot for the article on that unlikely unit, the dash. Its straightfaced assertion that (according to one RS) "1 Dash ≡ 0.00000295735295625 m³ is one of the funniest things I've read in Wikipedia. But no! I must stop myself from mere handwaving and instead summarize what an independent source says. My own source is Kesakatsu Koizumi (as his name would be reversed for en:WP), Tan'i no jiten (i.e. "A dictionary of units"), 4th ed, Tokyo: Rateisu, 1981 = 小泉袈裟勝、『単位の辞典』第4版、東京：ラテイス、1981年. (It has no ISBN.) Koizumi says that it's one 27th of a fluid ounce, or 1.095 ml. Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised to find that various books had attempted to quantify a "dash" in whichever units their readers were assumed to find most familiar, and that these arbitrary and rough equivalents were then earnestly converted (to three or more significant figures) into other units by the unthinking (or leg-pullers). The notion that the article Dash (unit) might live on and accrue "precise definitions and sources" (as both the earnest and the witty pursue "independent sources") -- yes, this is starting to thrill me. -- Hoary (talk) 02:36, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry if I sound miserable, but "fluid oz" isn't even a clearly defined unit: it might be the volume of an avoirdupois ounce, but the American one isn't. Humour tumour rumour, it's so tempting to get a friend to create Bulgarian units of measurement, with the Tog = 3 1/2 Tigs, Tig coming in three varieties, etc etc, but no parody ever quite matches the disaster level of real unreliable sources. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:01, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, good catch. Koizumi doesn't specify which fluid ounce he means, but when we multiply 1.095 by 27 we get the right number of millilitres for a US fl oz. (Yes of course it's imaginable that he read somewhere that it was one 27th of an unspecified fl oz, guessed that this was the US version, and thereupon calculated it in microlitres.) -- Hoary (talk) 11:51, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Delete: But an additional comment: Cardarelli/Shevonsilva have huge numbers of these vaguely specified "Units", but fail to distinguish genuine units which are counted, including even such as "teaspoon", in "add 2 teaspoons of salt", from quantities which are not counted. It is not possible to have "2 dashes of rum" (because actually if desperate you would write "a large dash of rum", and given most people's inability to distinguish linear scale from volumetric scale "large" would be at least twice as big). Imaginatorium (talk) 03:55, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, here's a rum complication: it turns out that you can indeed say "two dashes of rum", and more certainly you can say "two dashes of bitters". Though I wouldn't read too much into this; I mean, you can also say "two carfuls", but I don't suppose that anybody here wants to suggest that a carful is a unit of encyclopedic significance. (But I'd better not give people ideas.) -- Hoary (talk) 11:51, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Create new section ("Cooking") in List of unusual units of measurement; Merge/Redirect all to that section.--Раціональне анархіст (talk) 18:37, 2 January 2015 (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.