Wikipedia:WikiProject Beauty Pageants/Sources

Not Reliable sources

Anyone can create a personal web page, self-publish a book, or claim to be an expert. That is why self-published material such as books, patents, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, personal or group blogs (as distinguished from newsblogs), content farms, Internet forum postings, and social media postings are largely not acceptable as sources.

These might be useful to read to find more reliable sources of information, but shouldn't be used as sources in citations. They are run by fans, amateurs, and are basically self-published sources, no one is checking to make sure they are correct, so while they may have correct information, they may also have incorrect information, we can't rely on them. The following sites are examples of questionable sources that may either have poor reputation for checking the facts, lack meaningful editorial oversight, or have an apparent conflict of interest:

Angelopedia: Not quite a publicly editable wiki, but accepts articles from participants. The website has On the Wikipedia blacklist. See also RSN.
awardgoesto.com dead domain, formerly blog of Ashish Patel
beautymania.biz, fansite associated with "Rellon"
beautypageantnews.com, anonymous writers on a Wordpress blog, gmail contact address, describes itself as "A BLOG THAT COVERS NEWS ON BEAUTY PAGEANTS" [1], domain dead since ~2018
Conan Daily: Website run by a small staff with insufficient editorial oversight, not clear how professional they are. Namesake and owner Conan Altatis had an article here.
Critical Beauty This is a blog and YouTube channel run by a single person, Rafa Delfin, collating beauty pageant related news articles. They often have the original sources at the bottom, and those original sources might be useful to look into, but not the blog reposts.
Fashion Magazine NYC: No editorial policies or list of staff; gmail contact address; appears to be SPS indistinguishable from a fansite
Global Beauties: A pageant site founded and manned by the owners/editors: Henrique Fontes, Edwin Dominguez, and Andreigh Sleigh, who is the creative director of Miss Supranational pageant. The site promotes its "Grandslam major pageants" such as Miss Universe, Miss International, Miss Supranational, Miss World and Miss Grand International. Henrique Fontes is also the national pageant director in Brazil for Miss World and Miss Grand International. This site is not reliable source for wiki articles due to lack of reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, self-promotion, and personal financial benefit.
missitems.be: anonymous and bloglike, concealed registration
MissoSology.com: As it says, "Missosology.com Crawls Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Wikipedia and other public access RSS feeds for the latest public news related to the topic of this premium domain." At best this is a content aggregator; however it also has a prominent "Publish Article" link at the top, so it may take unvetted user submissions.
Missosology.info: a popular user generated forum of Missosology.org, but no fact checking at all, and minimal moderation.
Missosology.org A beauty pageant site that covers, analyzes, and promotes the "Big5 Ranking" - Miss Universe, Miss World, Miss Earth, Miss International and Miss Supranational.
misterology.com blog
newsyodel.com anonymous, machine translated aggregator
Normannorman.com ("or you can simply call this site "Norman's Blog"): As it says, this is a blog by a beauty pageant fan, even if a knowledgeable and dedicated one.
OPMB Worldwide This is an online pageant magazine and blog site operated by Noli Berioso who covers beauty pageants in general.
ownthatcrown.com A pageant site that says it "offers pageant directors the opportunity to advertise local beauty pageants for girls interested in pageants" and "showcase[s] some of the best pageant dresses on sale along with other pageant resale items". Registration concealed.
Pageant Circle A pageant site that caters to press releases, conducts interviews, covers beauty pageants but with small number of staffing.
pageantempire.com, a WordPress blog
Pageantopolis.com a personal site of Donald West, but the account had been suspended and will not be renewed as per website. A useful source for facts in beauty pageants but does not support notability.
Pageant Planet offers pageant coaching/representation, financially non-independent
pageantupdate.info anonymous one-person Wordpress hosted fansite
Sashes & Scripts A pageant blog published by Jesson Capuchino, a fashion retail professional, as part of the pageant portal Sash Factor.
sashfactor.info A web forum (user generated content), now abandoned/hijacked and serving questionable "security plugin"
The Kaleidoscope of Pageantry A pageant blog site run by Vagisha Mishra.
thegreatpageantcommunity.com a Wordpress blog lacking any personal attribution
timesofbeauty.com redirects to blogger.com
topvzla.com anonymous Wordpress blog
pageantsnews.com anonymous and bloglike
Wikiwand is a WP viewer therefore WP:CIRCULAR
worldbeauties.org anonymous and bloglike
world360news.com, dubiously titles itself "Chhattisgarh News", appears to invite reprints of press releases via a gmail address. pageant.news seems to be related based on domain registry to "Chhattisgarh.News"
worldshowbiz.info, blog per their own "about us" page
any sub-site under blogspot.com
social networking websites such as Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook see note below

Potentially reliable sources

Any material must be supported by reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Use sources that directly support the material presented in an article and are appropriate to the claims made. The best sources have a professional structure in place for checking or analyzing facts, legal issues, evidence, and arguments. The greater the degree of scrutiny given to these issues, the more reliable the source.

In several countries in Asia, beauty pageants are seen as more important than they are in the West.

If available, academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources.
Editors may also use material from the "mainstream media" such as mainstream newspapers, television, magazines, that have a good reputation and a history of reliability, will cover some beauty pageants even if they don't specialize in beauty pageants, and are usually reliable.
ETimes Beauty Pageants / beautypageants.in: This is the Beauty Pageants section of The Times of India, still a popular Indian news outlet, and once a very respected newspaper. It produces a lot of coverage of beauty pageants, and should be useable for facts, but take two caveats into account:
- First, The Times Group that publishes The Times of India is the sponsor of the two largest Indian beauty pageants, Femina Miss India, also just called Miss India, and Miss Diva. Articles that ETimes Beauty Pageants, and really all of the Times Group newspapers, writes about these two pageants should be considered Wikipedia:Primary sources: in other words, it's likely to be correct for facts about who won, but it would not be useful for establishing Wikipedia:Notability, and should be looked at with skepticism and probably not be used if they seem to controversially promote these two pageants, or controversially denigrate rival pageants.
- Second, as part of the ETimes Entertainment Times section, it bears this warning on the bottom: "ETimes is an Entertainment, TV & Lifestyle industry's promotional website and carries advertorials and native advertising." This means that it may have advertisements that look like news articles (see linked terms). It's not clear what these will look like. These definitely include:
  - the links on the front pages of ETimes and ETimes Beauty Pageants that are listed among the article listings, with grey text reading "Ad: (Company)" and "Sponsored by: (COMPANY)".
  - articles with disclaimers in the title, at the top, and/or bottom saying they are advertorials, for example this one from the Bangalore Mirror, and this one from the Economic Times, both sister newspapers of The Times of India from The Times Group.
  - It's not clear whether they are limited to this. (Anyone with knowledge of whether such disclaimers are required in India is invited to comment!) Basically, if an article seems like an advertisement, it may be. Advertisements are also Wikipedia:Primary sources at best.
Rappler Pageants: Rappler is an influential Philippine online news site, headed by award winning journalist Maria Ressa.

Social media

National or top-level pageant official social media accounts may be an allowed under the WP:ABOUTSELF exception, but independent RS are preferred. Note that an article primarily based on self-published material may not pass the general notability guideline.

Image sources

Per the Wikipedia:Image use policy we can generally only use images that are free for everyone to reuse and modify, like the rest of the Wikipedia. (There is a limited possibility for fair use images, but only in rare cases; for one thing, images of living people are almost always required to be freely licensed.) So, many articles have to live without any images illustrating them, which can be especially hard for articles about beauty. Here are some possibilities to find free licensed images for beauty pageants or contestants. If you do find some, please upload them to Wikipedia:Wikimedia Commons, so other language Wikipedias (and even other non-Wikipedia users) can also use them.

Government images

The laws of several countries put images made and published by their government into the public domain.

The Philippine government
The United States federal government. Note that this does not generally affect state or local governments. Many US federal government sites have the top-level domain .gov. The web portal USA.gov, https://www.usa.gov/, allows searching most .gov sites.
- The United States military (but not state Guard or militias) is part of the federal government; it mostly uses the top-level domain .mil; also the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service portal hosts many military images. Most public domain military images are accompanied by text such as "(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Petty Officer John Smith/Released)".

However, not all images on government web sites were made by the government. This requires some care: if the image doesn't specifically say it was made by someone working for the government, then it might have been made by someone else, and therefore not be public domain even if on a government web site. Take a look at the context: government images are usually of people with government officials, or otherwise in government contexts.

Flickr

Flickr is a popular image website that allows users to mark their images with Creative Commons licenses. Those marked "Some rights reserved" with the icons Attribution or Attribution Share-Alike, as well as those marked Public domain dedication, and United States government work (see above) are acceptable for our purposes. You can use the "Commercial use & mods allowed" choice on the "Any license" dropdown on the Flickr search page to help find them.

Again, care needs to be exercised to tell which images are most likely owned by the Flickr user, so can be released, and which likely aren't, so are probably copyright violations. For example, see https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelhoward836/15719264673 - this is a picture of a beauty queen at a contest, and marked "Some rights reserved" Attribution. However, it is low resolution (under 1000 pixels per side), it looks like a professional quality image, while the user on the site is not marked "Pro" for professional, his photostream does not have any other images from the event (which might indicate he was physically there, taking photos), and instead has a wide variety of other images from unrelated events, including several that seem to be screen captures from television programs. From all these factors, is most likely the user is not the photographer of this image, so can't release it. For a different example, see https://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/14070410574 - this is a picture of a different beauty queen, also high quality, marked "Some rights reserved" Attribution. However, here, this is a high resolution image (3000 x 5000 pixels), the user is marked Pro for professional, and has multiple images from the same event: [2][3][4]. We can believe this is the photographer and has the rights to release the image.

YouTube

YouTube is a popular video hosting website, that allows users to mark their videos with "License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)" (often hidden under the SHOW MORE link in the description), which meets our requirements. Screenshots of these can make acceptable images. The Creative Commons selection under the YouTube search can help, but doesn't actually restrict the results to only Creative Commons videos, we need to look for the mark on each individually.

Again, some YouTube users upload videos they don't actually own the rights to, and we need to be careful of those. An example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VldAwXNQs0c - this is a compilation of beauty pageant contestants, marked Creative Commons Attribution license. However, look at the video - many of the parts have watermarks of different television channels or programs, and the YouTube user is not any of those channels. They almost certainly do not own the rights to those videos. In contrast, consider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkk3HqxPJvc - this is also marked Creative Commons Attribution license. Here, however, beauty pageant winner is clearly being interviewed by the program host, which host shows up in multiple other episodes of this YouTube channel, and the channel is mostly dedicated to such interviews. We can believe the YouTube channel owns and can release the video.