Talk:Rapid unscheduled disassembly

Translation notice

To do the Musk meme justice, and for more coverage in different fields, I translated a German article and included the redirect target as a link.

Alossola (talk) 10:52, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Notability(?)

@Rosguill commented "Cited coverage does not discuss the term in detail, article seems doomed to WP:DICDEF status."

But, there is an explanation - what more to do? Native english speakers, please help! I think that people want to know what Mr. Musk's talk was about. These situations are shown.

And, the WP situation before was

1. this page, Rapid unscheduled disassembly, was a redirect to "Spaceflight accidents" (see "See also"),
   It was and is included in Rud (disambiguation)
2. in parallel, Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly was and still is a redirect to "rocket engine ignition".

Was that better than now? I don't think so. Of the +-50 spaceflight accidents, only one, "Challenger" (28 January 1986), was a RUD. Also, "rocket engine ignition" is only a theoretic cause of RUD. Alossola (talk) 09:13, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

I would see this as two separate issues 1) whether or not notability for an article is established and 2) if the answer is no, are there useful targets for the redirects? The answer for 2 will follow from whatever the outcome of 1 is.

My concern regarding the notability is that we don't have sources that go into depth about the history of the phrase or its broader significance, only the explanation that Musk's usage was a euphemism. If that is as good as coverage of this topic gets, this would be more appropriate as a wiktionary entry, not a Wikipedia article. I would want to see several paragraphs of analysis of the phrase itself across the collected sources to establish an article.

Currently, among the assembled sources, the only one that offers even a little bit of this kind of coverage is The Guardian, with a paragraph about how this term originated on Kerbal Space Program forums; this is further problematic, because another assembled source, this text from 1970, directly disproves that claim through its use of the term ~40 years before the release of KSP (and there's myriad other results for use on Google Scholar that use the term prior to KSP's release, but unfortunately do not dedicate analysis or description to it). So the one piece of significant coverage we have is of dubious reliability. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 14:20, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

You may have overlooked it, but the article in fact refers to that 1970 text. Alas, it's only close to "Musk's" term, which I noted - no disproval of the (amended) text.

The intention was to cover the meme brought up by Musk. Your demand of in-depth analysis, OTOH, exceeds my intentions and proficiency.

Any takers for an extension? Alossola (talk) 05:43, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Well, what I'm arguing here is partially that it's beyond everyone's intentions and proficiency because I found no evidence of the kind of coverage we need to look for when searching online, and consequently believe that it doesn't exist.

That having been said, dictionary definition entries are more than welcome at Wiktionary, and I think that it makes most sense to have this page redirect to the already-existing Wiktionary page for Rapid Unplanned Disassembly. I'm going to go ahead and make that change now, which you are allowed to contest (in which case we would either continue discussion or proceed to an WP:AFD). _signed, Rosguill ^talk 13:53, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

It's o.k. - the German source of the translation has not been accepted as well. Alossola (talk) 10:05, 25 August 2023 (UTC)