Talk:Ipotane

Why is Ipotane being deleted? I saw a picture in the book of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where it shows an Ipotane.--Spenpiano 14:35, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Does the book mention them or were they just in the picture? --benseac 14:42, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Well! I suppose I guess. It's quite unknown, but my guess is that they might be in the books.--Spenpiano 14:48, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * That's the issue then, that they're not mentioned in the book. Articles shouldn't be written about something solely on a picture unless there are things written about them in the books, etc. Even then, if what's given is just their name and no real description, what they do, etc., there shouldn't be an article written about them. --Bennett Seacrist 14:56, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'm totally against deleting this page. Pauline Baynes did a picture of one that was standing right next to Aslan, which I uploaded on the page, and I've made links to this page. Besides, this page, as you can see from the talk page, was already nominated for deletion years ago, but it never was. Obviously the admins decided against it. Storyseeker1 (talk) 19:14, September 30, 2012 (UTC)

Deletion Discussion Renewed
It looks like people were planning to delete this three years ago. I don't know why it never happened, but this seems like a fairly straight-up case of illustrations-aren't-canon. Lasaraleen Tarkheena (talk) 19:17, September 30, 2012 (UTC)

How are they not canon? Pauline Baynes was the original illustrator when the books were first published. She worked right alongside Lewis who checked her pictures and everything. He obviously approved the Ipotanes, as it is clearly not a centaur in the picture. Storyseeker1 (talk) 19:22, September 30, 2012 (UTC)

This is a quote from the Cleanup talk page archive: "And to keep the Beast article from becoming huge, if a particular animal cannot be found in any of the books, mentioned by name (not appearing in the pictures, but in the text), then it should be removed from the article. And I suppose we should let animals clearly seen in the films in, too, with a disclaimer that it is purely film info." If you look, you can see that there was consensus in agreement with the decision. (I didn't bother to copy the agreeing comments.) This is just what I found on the talk page, so it's likely not set in stone if we need to make an exception. However, it seems like if we can't find anything less generic to say than what's on this page, it doesn't deserve to have a page at all. Once we remove the reference to the illustration (which is out of universe info), we can't say anything about Ipotanes that couldn't also be put on the goat page. Perhaps the illustrations are canon in the sense that they are part of the official collection of CoN work, but the general consensus seems to be that--for the purposes of this wiki--they are not canon in the sense of deserving articles. Lasaraleen Tarkheena (talk) 21:09, September 30, 2012 (UTC)


 * This is a good point and I'm inclined to agree with it (though that whole situation with the idea of merging all the creatures into a "beast" page still seems crazy). I think we need to go through the entire Wiki Format and make sure we agree with what it says and see if things (like this) need to be added. In this case I find it a bit far-fetched to make an entire article about a creature we know nothing about (beyond what it looks like); it was literally not mentioned in the text. I do think, however, that we might make an article about the creatures of Baynes' illustrations; giving a description of her take on the creatures of Narnia. Thoughts? 05:16, October 1, 2012 (UTC)

Well, it's better than deleting all this info. I suppose we could just put info on all the creatures from Pauline's pictures on the one page, thus saving space. I don't think there's a lot of creatures, though, that wasn't mentioned in text, aside from the Ipotanes and a few birds. In the Ipotane pic you can see what I think is a pheasant. Anyone know any others? Storyseeker1 (talk) 15:52, October 1, 2012 (UTC)


 * A couple years ago someone made a huge number of pages based on creatures which were deleted as non-canon. Turns out they were mostly from illustrations. So the possibility is there, it's just going to take a long time to do! ~Arvan 21:06, October 1, 2012 (UTC)

I still don't quite see the point. Imagine a scenario where someone wants to look up "Ipotane." He would have to see the illustration, know what the creature is called (which is unlikely), and not know some in-universe info about ipotanes that we might have on an ipotane page. Currently, there is no in-universe information on the page except what the imaginary person would already know: they appeared in a picture in LWW in such-and-such a setting. Everything else we could possibly put on the page is either extrapolation that the person could easily make for himself, or else non-canon info about mythological history. Maybe we could allude to all of the illustrated, non-canon creatures in a trivia section of Pauline Baynes, but I don't think creatures about which we have so little in-universe info deserve an in-universe page to themselves, or even one for all of them together. I think the best option might be to have a page for all of the illustrated creatures (like Storyseeker1 suggested), but make it out-of-universe, so that we can more plausibly discuss things like where in the book the illustration appeared and the mythological history of each creature. Lasaraleen Tarkheena (talk) 00:35, October 12, 2012 (UTC)