- 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. The "delete" opinions are both more numerous and more convincing. The "keep" opinions make the point that the topic is interesting, but that is not a criterium für inclusion in Wikipedia. Rather, we care about notability, as reflected in substantial coverage (more than passing mentions) in reliable sources, and the "keep" side fails to cite such coverage. Sandstein 08:39, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
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- The Pizza Meter ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log | edits since nomination)
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This article attempts to show that this is a real, coherent concept, when in fact it's just a single Domino's pizza store owner's post hoc observations synthesized into something supposedly substantial. Citation 2 (available here from 1991) is his very brief (unverified) claim of delivering more pizzas to the White House, CIA, and Pentagon, including ahead of the invasion. Then at cite 1 ( here from 1991) the same Domino's owner briefly makes the same claim that late-night deliveries to government offices increased. That's it! Cite 3 is from the unreliable "rec.humor.funny" about the same claim from the same year, cite 4 very briefly mentions the same 1991 reports, and cite 5 is a brief, unreliable anecdote from someone who heard the same factoid on the radio. This is one person's anecdata that got some very brief attention, not a verified or meaningful phenomenon as the article puffs it up to be, and not something notable deserving of a standalone article. People order delivery when they work late, so what? Reywas92 Talk 19:12, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
- Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Food and drink, Military, Politics, and Washington, D.C.. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 19:16, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
- Delete: Might have been a wikipedia article in the 1990s... I don't see coverage of this since that time frame. I'd expect it to continue into the multiple invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Oaktree b (
talk)
20:19, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
- Keep: If this might've been a Wikipedia article in the 1990s, it should be a Wikipedia article now. Information doesn't have an expiry date. This cultural phenomenon, though fairly minor and short-lived, is still worth documenting. The
Slate article from 2016 linked below and
the YouTube video that brought me to this article show that the topic is of some contemporary interest too. —
turdas
talk -
contribs
13:37, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- The Slate article is just a single paragraph that again only references the one-off 1991 comment as "online anecdotes". None of the rest of the article is about this. Reywas92 Talk 13:51, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Keep: If this might've been a Wikipedia article in the 1990s, it should be a Wikipedia article now. Information doesn't have an expiry date. This cultural phenomenon, though fairly minor and short-lived, is still worth documenting. The
Slate article from 2016 linked below and
the YouTube video that brought me to this article show that the topic is of some contemporary interest too. —
turdas
talk -
contribs
13:37, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Delete: per OP. Seems to be one (non-notable) claim by the local Dominos which just got repeated by a few outlets. — Czello ( music) 21:33, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
- Does it really need to stand up to robust analysis in order to be notable enough for an article? e.g.
Waffle House Index,
Big Mac Index, etc. Whether a concept is epistemologically sound is not related to its notability. Or, put another way, we have articles for things like
Divination and
Fortune Telling. We don't delete them just because those things have no supporting evidence for their efficacy.
Fredo699 (
talk)
22:39, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
- Notability and verifiability are separate criteria. The nominator isn't basing their deletion rationale on the lack of robust evidence but rather the fact that it's an insignificant "concept" based solely on unverified observations from a single Domino's pizza store owner. Mooonswimmer 00:21, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
- Delete per nom. Apparently there was a short-lived annual report put out by Dominos in the mid-90s called the "Pizza Meter," based on interviews of 500 deliverers and store managers nationwide (see here, here). Potential redirect to Domino's Pizza? Mooonswimmer 00:26, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
- Keep: I actually saw a video on youtube that referenced the 'pizza index' and came here to get more information. Seems like the purpose of Wikipedia is to provide that exact service. Link:
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRohz9VO1YY
Tkircher (
talk)
22:37, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
- It's stupid, incorrect videos like this why the article should deleted. It's insane that people are making shit up like "It turns out there's a method to find out [the exact date of an operation]...discovered by Frank Meeks. He knows that Operation Desert Storm is going to commence tomorrow on January 17 due to the spike in late night pizza orders from government offices." Except that's total bullshit, Meeks didn't know anything, he claimed this connection to ordering his pizza retroactively. The original 1991 quote in the Tribune observed there was an increase in deliveries "since the war broke out", not that he predicted it beforehand! Then this amateur youtuber says "This correlation was coined 'The Pizza Index' which also successfully predicted military action ahead of time in many other cases." Wrong! There were no predictions (how could you predict anything beyond a vague 'they must be busy with something'), Meeks only made these claims about the Gulf War after the fact! I am very disappointed how the article presents this as an actual predictive phenomenon rather than a single company owner's anecdotal cherry-picked data and even more disappointed that
Depths of Wikipedia posted it, resulting in other people like this running with it as more legitimate than it actually is. Unfortunately it doesn't really work to have an article just to debunk or clarify an urban legend; I'm surprised how poor the article
Operations security is, but this deserves no more than a single sentence like "In 1991, an owner of pizza franchises observed that pizza delivery orders to the Pentagon and White House increased at night during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; such relationships can be used in
traffic analysis", cited to
[1].
Reywas92
Talk
15:00, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Isn't dismissing "stupid, incorrect" claims like this part of the reason Wikipedia exists? Rewrite the article to tell the true story of how this was mostly a singular event or an urban legend of sorts in the 90s. It's relevant enough to have been covered
in the Washington Post too (I found this article with a total of 15 seconds of googling), so I don't think the /relevancy/ of this is in question. The article's presentation of it could be misleading, but clearly this was an actual "thing" in the 90s. —
turdas
talk -
contribs
15:12, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- I'd rather not have a stand-alone article on something that has little substance or sourcing beyond a few sentences at a time. With the WaPo article, are you suggesting expanding it into something saying that even government staffers get delivery when they have to work late? Why would that be an encyclopedia article? That has just a brief mention of Domino's having a Pentagon delivery record set during the Gulf War, nothing predictive, nothing substantive – we don't need an article to say a couple hundred people (1-2% of the Pentagon's workforce) had pizza delivered and someone realized later why they were working late. Maybe there should be a bullet in
List_of_common_misconceptions#United_States!
Reywas92
Talk
15:31, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Saying that it's just about government staffers getting delivery when working late is a reductivist argument. If it really was as uninteresting and mundane of a fact as you claim, then it would never have made news in the first place. Also, this wasn't just a retrospective, it actually was predictive in at least one instance:
this Chicago Tribune is dated January 16 1991 and mentions the Dominos guy's prediction from "Tuesday" (January 15, presumably), and the Gulf War's
main air campaign began on January 17. —
turdas
talk -
contribs
16:51, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Something being interesting enough for a newspaper article does not mean it needs a stand-alone article. They're decent fun facts as a sort of Human-interest story but not everything above the mundane is to be included here this way. But seriously, was this pizza index predictive, or did everyone know military action was imminent? January 15 was the UN-imposed deadline for Iraq to withdraw before force was authorized. Just a couple days earlier Congress passed a resolution approving use of force! Troops knew we were on the verge of war! The Pentagon was working late every night that week, but maybe the night before they had ordered from Pizza Hut instead of from the guy who was happy to talk to the media! I admit my comment above was incorrectly dismissive of the timeline, but just because you can draw a connection between things doesn't mean it has encyclopedic significance or should have its own article. Reywas92 Talk 18:45, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Saying that it's just about government staffers getting delivery when working late is a reductivist argument. If it really was as uninteresting and mundane of a fact as you claim, then it would never have made news in the first place. Also, this wasn't just a retrospective, it actually was predictive in at least one instance:
this Chicago Tribune is dated January 16 1991 and mentions the Dominos guy's prediction from "Tuesday" (January 15, presumably), and the Gulf War's
main air campaign began on January 17. —
turdas
talk -
contribs
16:51, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- I'd rather not have a stand-alone article on something that has little substance or sourcing beyond a few sentences at a time. With the WaPo article, are you suggesting expanding it into something saying that even government staffers get delivery when they have to work late? Why would that be an encyclopedia article? That has just a brief mention of Domino's having a Pentagon delivery record set during the Gulf War, nothing predictive, nothing substantive – we don't need an article to say a couple hundred people (1-2% of the Pentagon's workforce) had pizza delivered and someone realized later why they were working late. Maybe there should be a bullet in
List_of_common_misconceptions#United_States!
Reywas92
Talk
15:31, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Isn't dismissing "stupid, incorrect" claims like this part of the reason Wikipedia exists? Rewrite the article to tell the true story of how this was mostly a singular event or an urban legend of sorts in the 90s. It's relevant enough to have been covered
in the Washington Post too (I found this article with a total of 15 seconds of googling), so I don't think the /relevancy/ of this is in question. The article's presentation of it could be misleading, but clearly this was an actual "thing" in the 90s. —
turdas
talk -
contribs
15:12, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- It's stupid, incorrect videos like this why the article should deleted. It's insane that people are making shit up like "It turns out there's a method to find out [the exact date of an operation]...discovered by Frank Meeks. He knows that Operation Desert Storm is going to commence tomorrow on January 17 due to the spike in late night pizza orders from government offices." Except that's total bullshit, Meeks didn't know anything, he claimed this connection to ordering his pizza retroactively. The original 1991 quote in the Tribune observed there was an increase in deliveries "since the war broke out", not that he predicted it beforehand! Then this amateur youtuber says "This correlation was coined 'The Pizza Index' which also successfully predicted military action ahead of time in many other cases." Wrong! There were no predictions (how could you predict anything beyond a vague 'they must be busy with something'), Meeks only made these claims about the Gulf War after the fact! I am very disappointed how the article presents this as an actual predictive phenomenon rather than a single company owner's anecdotal cherry-picked data and even more disappointed that
Depths of Wikipedia posted it, resulting in other people like this running with it as more legitimate than it actually is. Unfortunately it doesn't really work to have an article just to debunk or clarify an urban legend; I'm surprised how poor the article
Operations security is, but this deserves no more than a single sentence like "In 1991, an owner of pizza franchises observed that pizza delivery orders to the Pentagon and White House increased at night during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; such relationships can be used in
traffic analysis", cited to
[1].
Reywas92
Talk
15:00, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Delete When you have to link to a comments section as one of your limited number of references, I think you can pretty safely say WP:GNG isn't met. SportingFlyer T· C 11:39, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- 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.