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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Public Information Research (2nd nomination)

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This is the current revision of this page, as edited by SheepLinterBot (talk | contribs) at 15:19, 20 February 2023 (→[[Public Information Research]]: [t. 1] fix font tags linter errors). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this version.

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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. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 21:00, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Public Information Research

[edit]
AfDs for this article:
Public Information Research (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

This is a garbage article and should be deleted, the organization is not notable and the whole last paragraph is completely pointless - who cares about a 16-year old boardroom skirmish? Giano (talk) 22:15, 16 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep - whilst I don't think it's the most important article we have, it's certainly notable per the organisation notability guidelines.. Per the guideline - "A company, corporation, organization, team, religion, group, product, or service is notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in secondary sources. Such sources must be reliable, and independent of the subject. " - PIR has been discussed in many secondary sources, including the New York Times making it clearly notable. Ryan Postlethwaite 22:19, 16 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reference #1 - Guidestar - a registration-required site that is being used to support factual information in the article, including the evidence that PIR is behind Wikipedia Watch and Google Watch, as well as PIR's revenue. If this information is not available except in a website that requires registration, that demonstrates the limited notability of the organisation.
  • Added note - When accessing this link using IE, it turns up as a registration-required site; however, using Firefox, I was able to read the site and the page for PIR. It turns out that PIR claims it earns less than $25,000 per year and thus does not file tax returns (see the "Basic information" section). GuideStar also encourages non-profits to edit/update their entries, and claims no responsibility for the content of the site. Therefore, it is not a reliable enough source to stand as the primary source for information. Risker (talk) 03:51, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. The Guidestar site is well-repected among people researching nonprofit groups. Its purpose is that it hosts the 501c3 tax forms of these organizations, so everyone doesn't have to send away to the government to get a copy of them. I imagine even if it allows organizations to upload corrections it would flag them as such. Nobody is suggesting the existence of such a tax form makes an organization notable, but this is an official, primary source used only for financial and organziational facts. It's the same as citing EDGAR or Dunn and Bradstreet. The "no legal responsibility" is a standard disclaimer used in all kinds of publications. I'd also like to point out that notability is not temporary. Wonder what the revenue of PIR was in the early 1990s. Or of its forerunner, Micro Associates, during the Iran-Contra era. Notice there were no complaints about Ref #2 - a 1988 The Nation article about Micro Associates. Squidfryerchef (talk) 02:06, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ref.#3 - New York Times - a 1987 article that focuses primarily on the National Intelligence Book Center, which apparently no longer exists and whose notability is not clear. There are no dots connecting it to PIR, which did not exist in 1987.
  • Comment. The article is about both the National Intelligence Book Center ( which I don't think is connected to PIR, but wish we had an article about it ) and Micro Associates ( the forerunner of PIR ). It is the second half of the NYT article we are interested in here. Squidfryerchef (talk) 02:06, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ref.#4 - Counterpunch Minor web news service that specialises in "muckraking". Only NameBase is mentioned in the article, PIR is not mentioned at all.
  • Ref.#6 - Salon.com The article is primarily about Google, and uses Daniel Brandt as one of several commentators on problems with Google. It mentions googlewatch.com and NameBase, but not PIR.
  • Ref.#7 - New York Times. This article is about John Seigenthaler's Wikipedia article. Daniel Brandt's role is portrayed secondarily, PIR is not mentioned, only Wikipedia Watch.
  • Ref.#8 - Society of Professional Journalists/AP Not even a direct link to the AP source, to start with. No information indicating if any other news sites/newspapers/journals even picked up the AP story, or if it was only published in this one source. Neither PIR nor any of the subsidiary websites are mentioned.
  • Ref. #9 - Link to NameBase webpage Shows names of directors and advisors and identifies PIR as a 501(c)3 organisation. Does not provide any information about PIR otherwise, does not list subwebsites, does not provide financial information.
  • Ref. #11 - Public Eye.org An opinion piece, revised twice over the years, mentions Dan Brandt and NameBase in passing while focusing on "the LaRouchian and Liberty Lobby networks".
This is Trivial Pursuit writ large. I cannot think of another 501(c)3 organisation with an income of only $25,000/year that is worthy of a Wikipedia article, and this one isn't either. Risker (talk) 23:35, 16 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete I don't see how an organization making less than $25,000 a year could possibly be notable. Captain panda 00:00, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep This seems to look a little like another attempt to remove all mention of the guy running it. The sources are present. Whether the notability is 16 years ago does not make any difference to an encyclopedia. And money != influence or notability. DGG (talk) 00:04, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • DGG, not one of the non-registration reference sources listed above actually mentions Public Information Research by name. None of them link Google Watch or Wikipedia Watch to PIR. Even the link to PIR and Namebase is shaky; I know several websites that have pages devoted to not-directly-related non-profits. My local SPCA brings in about 30 times this much money a year, and it certainly isn't notable. Risker (talk) 00:58, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, subject has very little notability. Sticky Parkin 01:00, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete I was going to say keep and analyze the sources for notability, but I see that Risker already did. We also might want to consider deleting these two related articles, as they suffer the problems:
  • Google Watch (very little sources, only the Salon article actually centers on the website, and even that one is very centered on its creator Brandt and not the website itself)
  • Wikipedia Watch (all notable sources seem to make only passing mentions. like NYT and The Register, Miami Herald seems to be centered on something else)

--Enric Naval (talk) 01:50, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete lack of reliable non-trivial independent sources. The main reason for keeping this appears to be individuals' personal feelings about Brandt. Understandable, but not a reason for having an article. The previous AfD showed clear consensus for not having an article on this subject, merge and delete strongly overwhelmed keep. Guy (Help!) 08:10, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Not notable. The last few sentences stink of a personal grudge and need to be removed, if nothing else. Tombomp (talk/contribs) 08:48, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks, JohnZ, for that additional research. When I was posting yesterday, I was on a restricted computer so couldn't access Google Scholar or Google Book. Let's review these new potential sources.
"In March 2002, Daniel Brandt, president of Public Information Research, discovered that the CIA Web site was using “cookies” in violation on federal policy" is the gscholar preview on this one.John Z (talk) 06:46, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Copyright and the Universal Digital Library, an apparently unpublished research paper written by a person associated with Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, on the topic of how Google Books may affect the Universal Digital Library project. Daniel Brandt, Google Watch, and PIR are referred to in one sentence of the 18-page paper. Quote from the paper: "In December 2004, Daniel Brandt of Public Information Research (PIR) and www.google-watch.org wrote a letter to Maurice Freedman of the American Library Association (ALA) urging ALA to pressure the libraries participating in Google Print to require Google to respect the anonymity of users of the digitized library books (Brandt 2004)." (Reference source: Brandt, Daniel (December 15, 2004). Letter to Maurice Freedman, American Library Association. Public Interest Registry (PIR). Available: http://www.google-watch.org/appeal.html ). Several other references to Google-Watch in the article.
  • Google and privacy, Paul S. Piper. Internet reference services quarterly (ISSN 1087-5301), 2005, vol. 10, no 3-4 (232 p.). [Article: 9 pages (5 ref.)], pp. 195-203. Unable to review, as the link is pay-for-access. Note: French website, although the article was written by an author affiliated with College of Arts and Sciences, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA.
  • Secrecy and Accountability in U.S. Intelligence, a paper prepared for a seminar on intelligence reform sponsored by the Center for International Policy in 1996. Used as a footnote for this sentence: "But in these cases and others, the public attitudes that eventually precipitated declassification became so deeply rooted that they have not been discernably affected by the release of the old documents. In this way, current classification policy promotes public stupidity. (42)." The footnote, one of 53, reads: "Conspiracy-mongering as a strategy for promoting declassification may have already reached its peak, as the threshold for outrageousness becomes unachievably high and public discourse becomes increasingly incoherent. Today, "No one is willing to read 20 books on the CIA when they can watch 20 episodes of 'The X Files,' and have more fun doing it," writes Daniel Brandt of Public Information Research . The result is a problem that Mr. Brandt terms 'Why Johnny Can't Dissent.' "
  • Über den Suchgiganten Google oder die Antwort auf die Frage: Wird Google auch zukünftig den Suchmaschinenmarkt beherrschen?, Susanne Richter. Apparently an online seminar sponsored by Freie Universität Berlin (Kommunikationswissenschaften), ISBN: 978-3-638-36184-2. The website and the article are in German, and the link is pay-for-access, so unable to review. A loose translation of the title is "About the search engine giant Google or the answer to the question: Will Google will continue to dominate the search engine market?"
Here's a better (free) link for this one. PIR is referred to only as one of 31 organizations urging Google to suspend Gmail in an open letter (in English). Hadn't had a chance to look at it yesterday.John Z (talk) 05:44, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid I am still not seeing significant coverage of PIR, although one or two of these references might be useful for the articles on the specific websites. Even the links provided to pay-for-access sites are unlikely to yield much more than a few footnotes or perhaps a paragraph within a much larger work, and they look to be mostly Google-focused. Risker (talk) 04:07, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it seems sufficient to me, in addition to what's in the article already, at least to support a merge and redirect. Toxic Burn has the information, not in the article or in Counterpunch, that PIR dates to the early 70's under the name Micro Associates, and is a bit more than just on NameBase. My interest in these matters is less than zero, but I think one should beware of applying standards too strictly to a case like this (navel taboo?), of deletion based on difficulty of writing a neutral article (how can people learn to write neutrally other than by working on difficult cases?) and of sorites - type reasoning.. So it seems more logical to keep this article, as the umbrella organization, and merge (some of) the various projects, Wikipedia Watch, Google Watch, NameBase, Navel Watch etc into it. Clearly this would result in fewer articles, and arguably this would result in less NGPOV than just deleting this article.John Z (talk) 06:40, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per Risker's excellent reasoning. Naerii 19:04, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Agree with the above. Great job Risker. Tex (talk) 21:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per Risker and Giano. While related entities might be somewhat notable, PIR fails WP:CORP as far as I can see. I have a suspicion that NGPOV (navel-gazing point of view) is the major reason we keep this around. We don't like WR, so we keep the article so we can have someplace to talk about Brandt & Co. In the greater world, it's just not that important. Kylu (talk) 03:57, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - it's time for Wikipedia to grow up and remove articles on people that nobody would care about apart from their being related to Wikipedia. (And to answer the "what about Jimmy Wales" question, when people start paying to see D.B. speak on the lecture circuit, then we can have an article about him.) --B (talk) 05:40, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just enough to support what is being said, the problem is that the references are not really doing that, see all the other comments above. Chillum 15:34, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's not so much the number of references, but what type of references and what they're referencing. Can you prove that PIR meets the requirements at WP:CORP? If so, share and (potentially) fix the article. Kylu (talk) 03:41, 19 July 2008 (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.
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