I agree on what you said on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dark Angels (Warhammer 40,000). I haven't edited Games Workshop Warhammer pages in a while, but it seems pretty eerie when you want to look up something, and it is no longer there. GoldDragon (talk) 04:18, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Essentially, what is happening here is that one or two editors have decided to undertake a comprehensive sweep of the dozens of pages dedicated to the fictional elements of Warhammer 40k. I am seeing the same two or three names pop up in every one of these AfD. This is different than someone with a grudge going in and deleting pages dedicated to a hobby or setting they don't like, which is what has been implied. However, I think it is better to do all of this at the same time. Wikipedia would be better off if a standard policy regarding fictional notability was adopted, since then there wouldn't be such a warren of lost links and disorganized pages. Deleting them piece-meal like this is not really a good answer. The policy should be set first, and then applied evenly across the entire range of content. Furthermore, the same policies that apply here should be extended to Warhammer Fantasy as well. They should also extend to every other fictional game setting. Dungeons and Dragons has this problem with most of its pages. Warmachine has it with all of its pages. Third Party sources do not exist to provide notability because the companies involved would consider such sources to be in violation of their IP. Unless the content has existed for long enough to draw academic interest, it can not generate third party sources. This does not accurately cover how noteworthy the information might be, since the strict interpretation of IP rules is an artificial constraint on coverage. I think the notability requirements in this case need to account for the scope of the non-third-party material. There is a big difference in notability between someone that has been mentioned once in a single book and something that has become an icon within a specific community due to use by numerous authors in numerous publications under the same umbrella IP constraints. As it is now, there are hundreds of settings where this problem exists. Books, games, and movies. Almost every comic book younger than 30 years. All but a handful of Star Wars and Star Trek pages. Every medium where fiction can be presented. From the fact these thousands of pages exist here, many of them well-researched and well-written, it can be gathered that this is something people are interested in preserving in an encyclopedic format. You can push all of these topics off to for-profit sites like Wikia, but I am not sure that is really honoring what Wikipedia is supposed to be.