User talk:DGG

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About: your eloquent summary of what does and does not improves this project

Hi DGG, or if I may be so bold, David,
You wrote at WP:AN/I Archive691: <block quote>There is more than one valid way of working here. Some people prefer to create only high quality articles, even though they may do very few of them. Some prefer to create many verifiable articles of clear notability even though they may not be of initially high quality. As this is a communal project, I think every individual person is fully entitled to do whichever they prefer, and the thing to do about people who prefer otherwise than oneself is to let them work their way, while you work yours. The only choice which is not productive is to argue about how to do it, rather than going ahead in the way that one finds suitable.</block quote> Many editors include a statement about their attitudes to editing on their user pages. I am not one of them, that is until I came across what you wrote. I would really like to include this on my user page. While I can add anything at all I like to my user page subject to WP:USER PAGE, I nevertheless ask for your permission to add the quote. OK with you? I'm fine if you decline this.
--Shirt58 (talk) 12:37, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Of course. DGG ( talk ) 21:04, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure I've seen you reference this essay

WP:TALKINGSOFASTNOBODYCANHEARYOU. Is my memory that faulty? I can't find it, and it's possible the syntax isn't precise. Did you use this a sort of irony? I seem to remember you used the link to represent bullying behaviors. I'm seeing one such user who seems to be wanting to turn the entire AfD process on its head by using such a technique. BusterD (talk) 11:48, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

I have sometimes used pseudo-links like these as a statement for their own sake, without writing an actual essay. I remember saying something like this, but I can't find it. I think this one was TALKINGSOMUCH... -- but I can't find it either. As for the problem, I've commented pretty extensively at AN/I: [1], and will comment at the RfC also, But please don't confuse the reasonable message, with which I am in agreement -- that Deletion Policy is overbalanced towards deletion, and one step towards rebalancing it would be to require some version of WP:BEFORE -- with the unreasonable way it is being over-expressed. DGG ( talk ) 23:23, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, David. I was a debater in school before "talking so fast" became the current style. I feel anything which games the system deserves appropriate response in order to keep the system sound. I appreciate your valid concern about deletion procedures being over-weighted toward one outcome. Thanks for your valuable comments in those forums. Be well. BusterD (talk) 23:37, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Ah yes, I had forgotten that context. And so was I, in college--a very valuable experience, especially in facilitating the sort of intercampus experiences only the athletic teams otherwise gave occasion for. But the stimulus is interesting: if I take a turn at NPP, the amount of junk turns me for a while into a deletionist before I catch myself and stop being so unfriendly to all the newcomers. If I take a look at AfD, the number of unwarranted nominations makes me want to give a similarly snappy and unjust response to all of them, with the less than rational thought that if I argue against all of them, maybe there's a chance the good ones will make it. Several good inclusionists have run into trouble here falling into such temptation. DGG ( talk ) 23:58, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

basic rules about professors

All full professors at major research universities have sufficiently demonstrated that they are recognized experts in their subject to meet WP:PROF,and that WP:PROF is an alternative to WP:GNG. This is not a formal rule, but almost all AfD have had this result, except in fields where people here have doubts about the rigor, such as Education. (Major: in the US, Research Extensive in the Carnegie Classification + schools of similar rank; elsewhere, similar level). The rationale for this is that this is the basis on which people are promoted to such rank at such universities, and their judgment is more reliable than ours.)

For those at lower level institutions, this is not automatic, and the judgment goes by individual cases; the rationale is that in such institutions people are often promoted to this rank based on lesser accomplishments or for other qualities than being a recognized expert in their subject.

For Associate professors, automatic notability is not generally accepted, but is determined case by case. AfD results vary, but imho are usually reasonable. Personally, I think it could be extended to them on similar grounds, but this has not had consensus. ("Associate" = the US rank, and corresponding ranks elsewhere)

For Assistant professors, and corresponding ranks outside the US, it similarly goes case by case, and almost all AfD results have been "not notable". I agree with this.

Additionally, in the humanities most full professors in the highest level universities-- ,-- have written two or more books that have reviews in RSs for notability, and thus meet WP:AUTHOR. In the very highest level universities, this applies to Associate professors also. In other fields, where tenure usually depends on articles, not books, this doesn't work as frequently, but it sometimes does. Similarly, in the fine arts, many people at various academic levels will qualify by WP:CREATIVE.

For that matter, if one argued on the basis of the GNG, we could find for almost anyone who has published one or more important papers that the 2 or more of the papers referencing them contain substantial discussions of their work. This would require examining the actual papers, as the mere fact of being cited does not necessarily or even usually mean there is substantial discussion of the work. If I really tried, I could probably find this for many people even at the post-doctoral level. As this result is contradictory to most people's intuitive feelings on the appropriate contents of an encyclopedia (as distinct from a faculty directory), it shows imo the uselessness of the GNG in this subject. Before the WP:PROF standard became accepted, I did use it when it matched my intuitive view. If we return to GNG-worship, I will go back to using it.

Where the GNG is used here appropriately , is for people at any level whose work happens to strike the fancy of newspaper writers. I don't consider most such people notable as academics, but since the public will read the news accounts and want some objective information, it's reasonable to have the articles here. (I have sometimes objected to isolated news accounts as being based on PR if it seems really counter-intuitive). DGG ( talk ) 17:39, Apr 24. 2012

Admin review

Which brings me to my pother point. When I was a new admin, I half expected someone would be assigned to follow me around for some time, just to make sure I was understanding the rules correctly. Either that didn't happen, or they were very, very quiet. (I'm even more surprised it isn't SOP at OTRS, but that’s a different issue.) I think we should have a more formal review system for new admins. I know there's the ability to check with someone else, but I'd like to see something more formal.

Having made my point, I'm not sure it belongs on the thread at this time, because my suggestion isn't going to help the problems that are being discussed at the moment, so maybe I'll think some more on it, and formalize a proposal later. Maybe after getting some thoughts from people like you.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 22:26, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

You are quite correct--I was oversimplifying. Sensible new admins do only the ones that are totally obvious while they are starting--it must be very discouraging to have people revert your first admin actions, and I've seen that happen. And it is true that I will make a point of checking speedy nominations others have thought it wise to pass by, and AfDs that people don't seem to want to close; I know some others do just the same, which is how we keep long lags from developing. But I had in mind also a few long term admins who actually do decide almost all equivocal cases as delete. To expand on what you have said , in a direction of my own,

I have occasionally checked a new admins deletions if I think from the RfA there is likely to be some problems, and I suppose others do similarly. But I do not know if any people systematically reviews the admin logs the way people do new pages--if anyone does, I've noticed no sign of it. The only thing I've seen checked systematically is the very long-standing page protections. It might be a good thing to do. The AfD closes are very visible, the prods have been checked by several people before they get to the top of the list, but speedies and blocks and unblocka and protections and unprotections don't get looked at, unless someone suspects a problem. I have sometimes thought of doing it, but I have always stopped, because, to be frank about it, I don't want to see the errors. I can't pass over a clear error I do see, and I am fully aware that some admins use the tools beyond the proper limits. Some of these are my friends, & I can mention it to them from time to time quietly. But for obvious reasons most of the ones I would disagree with are by people I often disagree with, with whom relations are often not all that friendly. I don't want to spend all my time quarreling and navigating sticky situations; though I may get the errors corrected, it is not likely to improve mutual relations. (I am also aware that I too make both errors and borderline interpretations, & I suppose I even sometimes interpret things the way I would like them to be, & if I have any enemies here, I do not really want to encourage them to audit me with the utmost possible rigidity. I expect I could be able to very well support my interpretations, but as Samuel Johnson put it, nobody however conscious of their innocence wants to every day have to defend themselves on a capital charge before a jury.

When I started here, I wondered how a system with a thousand equally powerful admins who could all revert each other could possibly exist. I soon learnt the subtleties of wheel warring--there were some major arb com cases on it during my first year here which pretty much defined the limits. But more important, I also learned that even the more quarrelsome spirits here understood the virtues of mutual forbearance--and that even the most self-sufficient people do not really want to look publicly foolish. Our balance is I think over-inclined to protecting the guilty if they are popular enough, but it is not as bad as it could be, or as it often is in human societies. DGG ( talk ) 03:25, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I smiled at your closing comment. I had the same, thought, although for the project as a whole, rather than just the admin function. I'm more recent to the project because, when I first heard about it, a few years before actually joining, I thought about the model and decided it couldn't possibly work. Oddly, I still feel that way, intellectually. If there were no such thing as Wikipedia, and I heard a proposal to create, my instinct is that it will fail miserably. I actually can't quite put my finger on why it hasn't failed.SPhilbrick(Talk) 12:52, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

"What DGG says"

David, that was great. Thanks! Drmies (talk) 20:03, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Deletion review response thank you / Tutoring newbies on how to do online research

I left a thank you for your response — and unrelated question(s) — here. Another thing that maybe we agree on is the importance of knowing how to do research. I really like Wikipedia's Search Engine usage guidelines and tutorial, and have tried to link to them from Wikipedia:Article titles — because I think it's important to research usage when deciding the best article title, best category title, or the most appropriate term to use — but my attempts to link to this have been repeatedly reverted by people who think they own anything related to the MoS. Likewise, for the same reason, I have been unable to add links from Wikipedia:Article titles to the regional MoS guides. The article on category naming conventions also does not explain how to search existing categories or link to the above article on how to use search engines to research the best category title, either. Maybe you have some advice or ideas on this? LittleBen (talk) 13:51, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

I discovered in my first year here that there were some parts of Wikipedia where despite my interest in the subject, for one or another reason I was unlikely to be very effective. Prominent among these were the MOS and categorization. I am a little concerned with article titles, and in that field, fundamentally I disagree with you -- I think the best article title should be the clearest and fairest, and counting ghits or the equivalent is usually irrelevant. And to the extent I understand categorization debates the problem there is often finding a sufficiently clear wording to encompass the desired set of article. I think the MOS is a little more rational than it was 4 years ago; if I were doing it, I'd limit to to pure matters of style, which does not include choice between article titles, just such matters as whether to use singular or plurals. But in questions like this , your opinion is as valid as mine, and there is no point in arguing the issue here--neither of us is "right". DGG ( talk ) 23:56, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

My main question was aimed at getting your opinion on "Tutoring newbies on how to do online research". You don't seem to have answered this, but maybe this is something that Kudpung is more interested in than you are. My comment on article titles was related to this: there seem to be many people creating new articles without adequately researching if there is an existing article on the subject already. Part of the problem is that Wikipedia Search, by default, only shows if there is an article title that is an exact match to the search term; it does not show if there is a category that matches the search term. If it did, it would be far easier to find related material. It is difficult to work out how to search categories. Terminology (e.g. article titles and category titles) is often inconsistent for this reason. Just one example: There are Web browser engine and List of web browser engines articles, but there are nine Comparison of layout engines (XXX) articles, and the category is Category:Layout engines. I don't understand your reference to counting ghits, and don't understand how my viewpoint disagrees with yours. LittleBen (talk) 02:25, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Incidentally, I got another response on the Deletion review thread that pointed me to a discussion here that may interest you. LittleBen (talk) 02:23, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I apologize for not covering everything. The WP search function is not the problem; if it does not find an article, it suggests searching for the term. Perhaps the page could be revised to suggest that first, rather than as an alternative to making an article. I think there has been some previous debate on whether it should initially search for the term rather than the article. I also have seen it said that by the standards of other search engines, it could use some sophistication. About 1/3 of people come here from Google etc., and though those search engines rank article titles at the top, they also include articles with the term anywhere. But the Google search engine is, deliberately, getting dumber and dumber; it is no longer possible to use the "+" character as an intersection, and Google Scholar has removed the limit to subject field possibility in advanced search.

Many apparently duplicate articles are created deliberately as a POV fork, others in the mistaken belief that WP includes essays on very specific term-paper type topics. Many are simply naive, as when someone submits a two sentence article on something where we have extensive coverage.

I think teaching people to search properly is a part of research, but the main result of its failure is not the duplicate articles, but the unreferenced articles. Way back when Google was new and exciting, we librarians used to impress the students by showing we could use it more effectively than they could. (The secret is partially cleverness and experience in selecting search terms, but mainly just persistence--something like 90% of users stop at the first page of results--I will if necessary scan through even a few thousand. I have found that people learn by experience better than didactic instruction, provided they are alert enough to pay attention to what experience shows them. Certainly we should do a better job teaching beginners, but the way I think works best is to show them one at a time how to do better. A person learns best when one individual person shows them how to fix their errors and misconceptions, and this is not done by templates. Besides Kudpung & myself, very few NPPatrollers or even admins take the trouble and patience. It's too much for a few people--we need everyone who is able to do it. We progress not by discussing how to work, but by working. DGG ( talk ) 03:38, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree that we progress not by discussing how to work, but by working. You seem to be better at that (more productive) than I am ;-) But sometimes it's more scalable if we offer others the opportunity of learning how to do the work (not specifically thinking of Tom Sawyer ;-). Thanks and best regards. LittleBen (talk) 04:23, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

FYI - user warnings

[2] As suggested. :) I think our next step is making sure that the code is correct, and then we can start implementing. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:48, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. It was suggested by several people at Wikimania that we quickly make similar changes in level 4 and 4im, and then consider whether to combine levels--that part would need an rfc. The easiest way to go now would probably be to go to three levels, by combining 2/3 , to avoid having to rewrite the level 1 warnings. DGG ( talk ) 21:54, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Library portal

I just accepted the AfC submission for the Library portal article now in mainspace. Since I noticed in the past that you're a librarian, posting this article here for your perusal, if you have the time or interest in checking it out, improving it, making any corrections, etc. Regards, Northamerica1000^(talk) 05:17, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for referring this to me. As you realised, this required subject knowledge. It's a valid topic, but even after your cleanup, still needed extensive further editing for conciseness and removal or original research; there were obvious indications of the origin of this as an essay or term paper. I did one round; I will do another later. DGG ( talk ) 07:25, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for checking it out, and for the improvements. Northamerica1000^(talk) 08:32, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Essay about Wikipedia

Hi DGG. I checked out your user page mini-essays - very interesting. Would you be available to talk about Wikipedia some time? I am writing about the philosophy and sociology of Wikipedia. 109.145.120.77 (talk) 07:22, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

certainly. Please make an account, activate your email from preferences, and email me from the email user link in the toolbox on the right. DGG ( talk ) 15:00, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks - I created the account and set up email. I will mail shortly. Hestiaea (talk) 15:14, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Iwill get back to you, probably next week. things are a little busy. DGG ( talk ) 19:31, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Bibliography of Encyclopedias

You are invited to join in a discussion at User talk:Dr. Blofeld#Bibliography of encyclopedias over my plans to develop a comprehensive set of bibliographies of encyclopedias and dictionaries by topic. I hope you see the potential of such a project and understand that while highly ambitious it will be drawn up gradually over time.♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:58, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Rising above the mediocre

What you said here was very interesting. "I do not think a community editing project where anyone can edit will ever rise above mediocre quality. Our goal should be to not come below it--above is unreachable. The greater the degree of summarization, the more skilled the writing must be. Even among the scholarly societies, many more are capable of specialized writing than of general introductions."

I would agree personally with that. Summarising a comprehensive subject is difficult, as it involves both a comprehensive knowledge of the subject itself (rare), and good communication skills (less rare, but not frequent). But it surprised me you say that because you seem to be one of the main defenders of the Wikipedia 'ideology', i.e. the idea of 'epistemic egalitarianism', the idea that a 17 year old has as much to contribute as a professor etc. Do you see any conflict between the view you expressed above, and your belief or faith in Wikipedia? Interesting Hestiaea (talk) 08:26, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't call it by such monumental terms as "faith and belief"; my hope and expectation for Wikipedia is that it will be a good and useful general encyclopedia. Some aspects of it are already very good, and can be excellent: comprehensive scope, up-to-date coverage. Some will be very good, and are quite good already: accuracy, referencing and cross-linking. Some will I hope become good, though they have problems at present: freedom from advertising and bias. Some will never rise above mediocre: the quality of the writing, including their detailed style. Some of all this is characteristic of a large scale community project: comprehensiveness, timeliness, lack or bias, linking. Some are special features of the people gathered here and they way they work: objectivity , accuracy, referencing.

The intention was for WP to be at the level of the average college student. Many 17 year olds are at that level, some considerably younger in fields with no special academic pre-requisites. Certainly the high school and junior high school Wpedians I have known in Wp circles have been working at a mature level. I learned this freedom from agist bias from my parents, who treated their children as rational beings who would learn more if given the opportunity. Here, we give them that chance. Children should be treated as adults as soon as they're ready, when it does not risk their safety. This is a very safe place, compared to others on the web. And it does not affect our own safety, because when there are errors, there are thousands of people to fix them.

As I said elsewhere, there still remains the need for an encyclopedia of higher academic quality. Most high school students would not be able to participate significantly, but neither would most adults. And a great many of those with advanced subject degrees I have known in my career would not have the necessary skill at comprehensive comprehensible writing. Scholars too need to be edited, and complicated works do best with skilled organization. It can be more efficient to have questions settled by editorial ukase. But not always: as you know, I joined WP and Citizendium at the same time, resolved to go with the one that made more progress. DGG ( talk ) 16:18, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! BTW I wasn't aware of your involvement with Citizendium.

I don't altogether agree with your comment about academic quality. I don't think articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy would be suitable for WP. What is needed is well-summarised and well-explained articles on difficult or general subjects that would be accessible to anyone of high school age (15-18) and above. The Wikipedia article on Being and the corresponding SEP article [3] are both unreadable but for different reasons. The WP article, as you will appreciate, is a rambling dog's breakfast of uncited original research (plus some glaring factual errors). The SEP article looks pretty accurate to me but just goes off into the clouds ("Anti-Meinongian First-Order View") once it gets going. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is better for a general audience but is incomplete. Hestiaea (talk) 09:15, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

You have mail!

Hello, DGG. Please check your email; you've got mail!
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Regarding a t-shirt nomination :) Jalexander--WMF 22:01, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Milking the bull

In working upon this topic, I observed that you had a particular interest in list of proverbial phrases. When I get a moment, I plan to make some bold edits there as it seems to have gone quiet. Just letting you know in advance... Warden (talk) 14:12, 23 February 2013 (UTC)~~

we perhaps should talk first. The main thing I think it needs is citations. I could put in a few dozen/hundred quickly. then of course it needs articles on all or most of them--that part I do not want to do. DGG ( talk ) 15:51, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Quick question: Outlines

In my work on public relations I came across this article Outline of public relations, which seems like a massively extended See also section of the PR article. Should I AfD it as a fork? CorporateM (Talk) 15:33, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

It's intended as such, essentially as a table of contents, like Outline of physical science, and many others: see WikiProject Outlines and Portal:Contents/Outlines. They are more systematically arranged than th text format of a general article, which requires reading, not scanning, to find specific topics. They are more article oriented than Portals -- see Portal:Philosophy, but more general than Indexes & Lists such as Index of standards articles or Glossaries, such as Glossary of US mortgage terminology . There's also a combination page type: Portal:Contents/History and events-- click "see in all page types".

It's a good question whether we need all of these systems of organization. We've tried others: a systematic organization based on List of Dewey Decimal classes or Library of Congress Classification or Wikipedia:Outline of Roget's Thesaurus, and yet others have been proposed. I think the overlap more than they ought to, but we'll never get agreement on which to concentrate on. Personally, I very much like the Outline of... structure, and would support it over the others. I believe that's the current tendency, also. Ideally everything would be indexed according to the two library systems also, because they're familiar--not that they're any good--especially LC, which was designed to match the structure of a US university curriculum in the first decade of he 20th century. There is no viable one dimensional way to organize knowledge--the alternative is some sort of Faceted classification, whose construction and use can get really complicated. There's even a totally different approach--to have no classification or indexing of any sort, but rely on free text implemented as we implement the see alsos, and the hyperlinks, as anything anyone thinks related, with no systematic organization. Or the extreme of having everything be a free text search.

Perhaps however you are asking whether every item on that particular outline you mentioned belongs--that's for discussion on its talk page, or whether other things should be added, in which case boldly add them. Or whether the whole outline is biased in some way, in which case, discuss it. Only if it is irretrievably biased or confusing should it be deleted.

Categories are a necessary complement--they are self-populating, but eliminate the possibility of saying anything about the individual items. I use them very heavily for what I do, which is, upon finding a problem article, finding others that are likely to have a similar problem. They should also do very well for finding term paper topics. They will be more effective as subject guides when we implement category intersection in a simply and obvious manner. (And there's the related Series Boxes, those colored boxes at the bottom. I dislike them--they're visually awful, and are used frequently to express or dispute a POV. But they do serve nicely to indicate missing articles.

Quick question, long answer. See chapter 17 of Wikipedia the missing manual for a longer one, oriented towards categories. DGG ( talk ) 18:29, 16 April 2013 (UTC) .

Library resources box

DGG, I and I expect others would appreciate your continued attention at the talk around user:JohnMarkOckerbloom's Template:Library resources box. There is a deletion discussion about this at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_30#Template:Library_resources_box. There was an article about this template in The Signpost in March, and some external press in other places.

This seems like a big issue which could set a precedent for how the Wikipedia community interacts with libraries. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:24, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

category intersects

Since you've mentioned wikidata many time, I thought you'd be interested in this: Wikipedia_talk:Category_intersection#A_working_category_intersection_today. We could use it as a band-aid while waiting for wikidata to spin up. Also w.r.t your votes - I think that whether we use the proposal i made above, or wikidata, simplifying the categories *beforehand* will actually make things easier. None of the categories i've proposed deleting could not be recreated through an intersect - but for now they serve to ghettoize and are against the guidance for ethnic cats.

Anyway, regardless of what you decide on the CFD votes, I'd really appreciate your input and help on the cat intersect proposal. cheers --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 05:25, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

I have almost always supported ethnic subcategories. People look for articles in these fields, often to find subjects for school papers. I in general agree with maintaining the categories in the meanwhile, but I'm not sure its worth arguing about them for the present, considering the degree of opposition. As I said there is that intersection will remove the entire need for the discussions.What we need most to keep are the categories from which the intersections will be constructed. (Defining and organizing the root data is a harder problem--I find some of the current Wikidata proposals a little too casual. Adding data fields as one thinks of them is not as good as a systematic ontology.) DGG ( talk ) 15:02, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

category intersection

You mentioned this in a few CFDs. Mind swinging by and giving your thoughts here, on a possible band-aid while awaiting wiki-data? Wikipedia_talk:Category_intersection#A_working_category_intersection_today? --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:52, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Quick question

I noticed you (and other admins) often tag pages for speedy deletion, even though you can delete them yourselves. Is this out of personal preference for wanting review by another admin or is there some guideline or unspoken rule that calls for review by at least two different people? Ramaksoud2000 ^{(Talk to me)} 00:36, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Most of us think it better that two people see the article. I am capable of mistakes, and I know I occasionally make them, because people are not at all reluctant to tell me--sometimes I will have missed something, or not understood, or just gone too quickly. Even for the utterly obvious, there's the possibility of carelessness or sleepiness, or just frustration at having been seeing so many totally unsatisfactory articles. I doubt anything requiring human judgment can be done at less than 1% error. I've deleted over 12,000 articles over the 7 years I've been doing this. and that would have been 120 wrong deletions, and potentially 120 good editors lost to WP. But with someone else checking, that makes it only 1 or 2 in the whole time.

In fact, I've argued that this should be absolutely required, but there are cases where one must act immediately, and it's been difficult to specify exactly the exceptions. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Oh ok, thanks. I agree with you. I was just curious. Ramaksoud2000 ^{(Talk to me)} 01:47, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I appreciate that there are times when you must act immediately, such as WP:ATTACK and WP:OUTING and possibly other situations. Do the admins have a tool that makes it easy for admins to "delete (or WP:REVDELETE) now, and list the page for review by another administrator ASAP" and if they do, to most admins who make "unilateral deletions" use this tool? davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:04, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) There is no rule that admins can't delete anything on sight, but tagging and leaving for a second admin to delete is a good, unwritten practice that most seem to observe. Most of us will of course delete blatant COPYVIO, attack, and vandal pages immediately and some other cases of obvious nonsense. However, admins don't actually make many mistakes with their deletions, so 'delete and review later' by another admin would be redundant. I've deleted around 3,000 pages and only restored 20, and those were userfications. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:15, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

I define 1% as "many" if one thinks of the cumulative effect over the years. If everyone who had a reasonable case stayed and complained, yes it would work, but most don't. There's also the definition of "error"-- does it mean an article that would pass AfD, or an article that with enough work might possibly pass AfD, an article to which the speedy criteria did not apply, but would end up deleted anyway The 1% is for the first two classes; for the third, it's more like 5%. In any case the error rate will depend on the type of speedys. I tend to look at the ones that have been passed over for a few hours. I only really know about my own errors, and of course my rate may be unusually high because I may be unusually incompetent. Some years ago I did intend to audit speedies--the reactions I received from admins involved in the ones I challenged persuaded me it was not the route to effectiveness here, and tolerating injustice in this was the way to be more useful overall. (There was 1, & only 1, admin who did change their practice in response to my comments.) I think I will decide the same about the G13 AfCs. DGG ( talk ) 20:57, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Current projects 7-3

I was reading through your current projects listed on your Userpage, and I was curious about 7-3; how would you first define what an "established editor" is? Autoconfirmed? 50 edits? Consensus? Anyhow, I liked 7-1 and 7-2 (and 7-3, just curious about the details). Please let me know when you put this in front of the community at large or if you'd like any help! Happy editing! --Jackson Peebles (talk) 06:49, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I really should revise these. The problems at WP change over time, and so do my interests. I am a little less concerned about articles directly, and more about how we deal with editors, I no longer object to using A7 for organizations, and I'm less concerned about the misuse of speedy in general. Since I wrote that 5 years ago, there has been a greater degree of consistency in speedy deletions generally, and in fact with deletion process generally. But more important, as WP becomes important, we are under increasing attack from people and companies who wish to use us for promotion, to the extent that very strong measure are indicated. Many of the A7 company & organization deletions also qualify as G11, and often as G12, copyvio. Their authors have no interest in contributing to an encyclopedia, but want publicity for their enterprises, and a greater percentage of them are paid editors. I have come to think at AfD that for borderline notability, we should also consider the promotional nature of the article--the combination of borderline notability and considerable promotion is reason to delete--but since that's a matter of judgement, it's a question for AfD, not speedy.

I am still willing to restore articles if anyone intends to work on them, and I'm always surprised at the few admins who aren't, I'd now say, not "established editor" but "editor in good faith", & when there's actually a chance of improving the article. In practice it's usually clear enough--and a good faith editorcan even include the rare paid editor who wants to learn and conform to our standards. The problem is a more practical one, of people finding out about the deleted articles. But this is related to what I see as the main current problem:

in the advice we give new editors. too many people rely on the templates, either in New Page patrol or AfC. In any case where there's a reasonable effort , it is really necessary to explain specifically either what is needed, or why it's likely to be hopeless--and by specifically I mean showing that one has actually read and taken into account the particular article. I don't always do this myself--there are simply too many articles to deal with them all carefully--but I try to do it if there's a likely prospect of improvement, in either the article or the editor. But most patrollers and reviewers patrol or review using insufficient care or the wrong criteria.

I'm currently not that much specifically trying to save individual articles, or even to teach individual new editors--I'm trying to use my experience to help the people who work with new editors do it properly. At this point it's not a question of changing our rules, but the way we apply them, and changing the practices and expectations of the people who apply them. I tend to do this as Idid 5 years ago with speedies--I can't check every article submission, but when I see inadequate advice, I can follow up with that particular person. ` DGG ( talk ) 23:15, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Request for input in drafting potential guidelines

Hi. There are, at present, no particular clear guidelines for religious material here, or, for that matter, guidelines for how to deal with ideas in general, particularly those ideas which might be accepted as true by individuals of a given religious, political, or scientific stance. There have been attempts in the past to draft such guidelines, but they have quickly been derailed. I am dropping this note on the talk pages of a number of editors who I believe have some interest in these topics, or have shown some ability and interest in helping to develop broad topic areas, such as yourself, and asking them to review the material at User:John Carter/Guidelines discussion and perhaps take part in an effort to decide what should be covered in such guidelines, should they be determined useful, and what phrasing should be used. I also raise a few questions about broader possible changes in some things here, which you might have some more clear interest in. I would be honored to have your input. John Carter (talk) 22:09, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

SIgns of promotionalism

For anyone watching, there are some internal signs of promotional-style biographies for businessmen that are almost always copyvio as well (besides the obvious giveaway of a statement of how important the company is, and especially a statement of how important their duties were in previous positions in the firm.)

Headings that use <big> instead of our formatting

Placing the education at the end, with a final sentence of about spouse and children.

Not giving the positions in chronological order, and often not including earlier positions except the one just before coming to the firm.

The corresponding signs for academics are slightly different, depending on whether they're done by a central office or by the individual. For senior administrators they characteristically include multiple junior executive positions and in-university awards. For any faculty, if the individual wrote it, it will often includes full details of all publications however minor; if the central office, it will omit most exact titles, especially for journal articles. DGG ( talk ) 01:39, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Local interest topics again

Hi DGG, a while back I asked you for your position on local interest topics. I think you may have forgotten about it. Could you see if you can find the time to give it another swing? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:32, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

As before, the problem is maintaining them free from promotionalism. The more local the organization, the more likely it is that any available sources will be essentially press releases. for example, I've got this problem in my own neighborhood, Boerum Hill: there are a number of interesting creative projects of various genres, as well as some fascinating stores, all with good coverage in the fairly respectable local paper, but that paper will essentially write an article on anything in the general area, and will say more or less what the proprietors tell it. (The paper's political coverage I do trust, and i could use it to justify articles on every city councilman and community board member in the Brooklyn, not to mention the losing candidates, but I don't want to push it against the consensus they aren't notable ) So Iwait until the NYTimes or at least New York covers something in a substantial way--New York may be a bit of a tabloid sometimes, but it isn't a PR outlet. I love local journalism. I even read it when I don't know the area--it shows the way people live, in all their variety. If we could maintain the articles, I might want to do it.

The best hope for this is a local wiki. The attempts at a local wiki in NYC haven't really taken off--there are insufficient people in any one neighborhood who understand, and the ones that exist tend to be dominated by the real estate agents and local attorneys. Or possibly something built around Open Street Maps--that sort of a geographical interface makes sense. Or a combined wiki, Wikipedia Two, still maintaining NPOV and sourcing, but not requiring notability and not all that strict on promotionalism.

actually, I'd like a three way split, WP, the general encyclopedia; WP 2 for local content, and WP+, for academically reviewed material. Citizendium offered promise for that third part, but it 's manner or working drove off too many of the good people. I in fact joined it as one of the original group of expert editors, but I didn't get along with Larry, and if you didn't support him, there was no place for you there. DGG ( talk ) 06:22, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your responses. Reading what you say, and thinking about my own experiences, the problem here is that local newspapers are reliable on some subjects, but aren't necessarily reliable on all subjects. Because of that, we have no objective measure on how useful inclusion in a local newspaper is as a measure for inclusion in Wikipedia, and some organisations and individuals will take advantage off that to inject their self-promotion in to Wikipedia, so you prefer to rely on other sources that make it easier to draw a clear line. Is that roughly it, or am I just filling in my own perspective? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:50, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

I prefer to rely on other methods than using the GNG to make it possible to draw a clear line. Decisions under the GNG come down to the details of what counts as reliable especially with respect to the key words "substantial" and "independent." Depending on what one wants to include or exclude, questions of what is a RS for notability purposes can often be rationally argued either way. But I've learned to work with the GNG, since it is unfortunately still the rule and likely to remain so.

And our key problem now is dealing with promotionalism. It's hard enough to deal with it in articles on major organizations--our standards for what we've accepted before were incredibly lax, and probably 90% of the articles on commercial and non-commercial organizations need to be rewritten. I'm reluctant to start including any thing that would add to the problem. DGG ( talk ) 00:43, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Edit description

Thanks for your edit description here, it's much nicer and more informative than the usual form message that gets left. --TKK ^{bark !} 00:32, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Deletion of EDP Energias do Brasil

Hi, DGG. I agree that the reason for deleted (creation by sock) is valid and serious. However, I have understandings that this is usually used for newly created articles, not for articles which have been for years and have been edited by number of other editors. Is there any other reason for deletion in addition to G5? The company itself is notable, so maybe you could restore the last version to my user space and I will clean it up before recreating? The problem with Edson Rosa's socks is that if we delete all articles what they have created, we should delete most of articles about Brazilian companies (and also some others from other countries). And it is impossible to stop his current editing as he uses dynamic IP from the Sao Paolo region. Beagel (talk) 07:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree that that is a consideration, but it should also be weighed against rewarding socks. If they know that the articles they create will remain, no matter how they create them, we keep the incentive for others to pay socks to continue to do this and it is getting way out of hand Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Morning277--I am One of Many (talk) 07:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Right. It's not impossible to stop the current editing. If we manage to remove all the articles now present, and continue to remove them as they get submitted, then there will be no incentive for that editor to continue. It's the only defense we have. (I did not previously think this way, but the problems we have now been finding are so severe, that they threaten the objectivity of the encyclopedia, and it's time for emergency measures. I agree there's a problem about removing such a large body of content, and the articles should be rewritten. Perhaps the time to rewrite them will be a little while in the future, once we get this editor to stop--and to rewrite them without any of their work in the edit history. I can certainly make the material available to use the references as a base for such rewriting, but perhaps it would be wise to wait. I see only one alternative solution, which is to require identification from editors, and that is such as drastic change in our principles that it is not yet time to propose it. It would be a serious compromise in our mission, but it's a better alternative than permitting promotional editing. We would lose truly open editing, but we'd still have an encyclopedia. DGG ( talk ) 07:42, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

note: I have come to re-evaluate the question of the articles by this particular editor. They seem for the most part unequivocally useful, and often just what we would do ourselves if we were adding content on these topics. I'm unsure how to handle this, and my opinion varies. Some other sockfarms have been very different, with promotional articles on sub-notable companies. 'DGG (at NYPL) (talk) 21:16, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Anthologies

G'day DGG,

Thanks for your comment We normally accept inclusion in anthologies as notability [4], which as well as being a welcome contribution to that particular discussion interests me more generally.

I agree we should, but is this documented anywhere? I can't find any explicit mention in guidelines or policies or help pages, but perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong places.

Or, are there other notability discussions where inclusion in anthologies has been cited as evidence? I don't lurk on AfD currently (I used to but WP:RM seemed to have a greater need) so I'd have missed them.

Any help appreciated. I'm vaguely thinking of proposing some sort of tweak to notability guidelines to better cover hymnists, and don't want to be reinventing the wheel and/or generating useless instruction creep. Andrewa (talk) 03:55, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

we've routinely used this for poets and writers of short stories, and for short stories themselves-- see for example Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mouse (short story), where it was used in a negative sense, deleted for not being in anthologies. I don't know we've used it in this context before. There was an explicit guideline once somewhere; I typically have the sort of memory that always remembers if I've seen something, but not necessarily where or when. Actually, I consider this an exceedingly broad criterion, but so is NBOOK, and in consequence NAUTHOR. . DGG ( talk ) 04:54, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Quality of new articles

Hi David. This year's conference was small (and slightly disorganised), but because it was small it was an excellent opportunity to press home some of the issues concerning the quality of new articles - and controlling the quality of the patrollers and reviewers. It was possible to meet and have in-depth discussions with the enablers and developers who (I belive) are now finally aware that these issues should be a Foundation priority. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:09, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

well, I hope you post some details about who said what, so we can hold them accountable this time next year after they will have done nothing useful,

But actually, it's not their fault, but intrinsic to the current stage of WP: there are three simultaneous factors: 1/ the more people rely on WP, the higher is the demand for quality 2/ the more important WP gets, the harder is to to maintain quality, because everyone will want to use WP for promotion 3/ The longer it is since we started , the earliest people with the most enthusiasm will have moved on to other things and it will no longer be as exciting for those who join now. None of these three factors can be alleviated by anything the foundation does, or that we can do here at WP.

The hope, is that we will get a new generation of editors, who rather than trying to play with something new, are people who want to produce something as useful as they can make it, without the casual attitude the pioneers did about actual quality and freedom from promotionalism. if we can do that, deficiencies of infrastructure will not matter. Good people with the right approach to the right goal can master any system. DGG ( talk ) 03:49, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Well said, though it is not the quality of new articles that should mainly concern us, but that of old articles. Hope you are all having/had a good time. Johnbod (talk) 04:20, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Opinion

Dear Sir. Long time no greetings! Thanks in advance for your view on this [5]Jimsteele9999 (talk) 00:59, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

we have always accepted an entry in Gale's Contemporary Literary Criticism & their similar series as notability , even if they call a figure minor. The article is in need of some cutting, which I will do tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 04:42, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

THanks for the reply. I guess I'm missing something, because he's not coming up on Gale, and mentions in NYT, etc. are not substantial. Jimsteele9999 (talk) 00:02, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

I will double check that, probably tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 22:39, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Sir, thank ye in advance.Jimsteele9999 (talk) 01:00, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Just to let you know

You have been (indirectly) mentioned here: Wikipedia_talk:Canadian_Wikipedians'_notice_board#Notability_is_defined_entirely_by_presence_of_reliable_sources.22.3F.3F.3F_-_Reply_to_Bearcat (I know you are busy - so I am pointing you to the middle of this very long text). XOttawahitech (talk) 22:32, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

actually, it's the whole general question I find of interest, & therefore I commented at considerable length myself DGG ( talk ) 23:13, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

notability check

Hi David This artist’s entry needs to be rewritten, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Jodoin, but as it has the notability flag, does someone other than myself need to review it? The artist is very well-known in critical art circles and in art school set, but not in the commercial sense. Her work illustrated the 2009-10 season brochure and eighteen posters for the Théâtre français at the National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa where it was also exhibited. It won the award for documents at the APPLIED ARTS Design & Advertising Awards Annual 2009 (Toronto). She has had solo exhibits at these public galleries: Richmond Public Art Gallery, British Columbia, Musée d’art de Joliette, Québec, Ottawa School of Art, Ontario, National Center, for the Arts, Ottawa, Ontario, Maison des Arts de Laval, Laval, Québec, Connexion Gallery, organized by University of New Brunswick Art Centre, Fredericton, New-Brunswick,McClure Gallery, Visual Arts Centre, Montréal, travelled to Nanaimo Art Gallery, Nanaimo, B.C, and solo exhibits in Montreal and Calgary and group shows in Praque and New York with commercial galleries. She also has been a guest lecturer at art schools in Montreal as well as:Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Fontbonne University, St-??Louis, Missouri, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, Minnesota, North Park University, Chicago, University of Calgary, Alberta, Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh. There are also biographies of her on university sites and she mentioned in the entertainment section of several newspapers http://www.richmondreview.com/entertainment/159955635.html . There are also about ten favourable critical reviews from Canada's top art journalists. There is no hurry for a reply if you are on vacation. Thanks HeatherBlack (talk) 14:37, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

If you want to rewrite it, there is no reason why you should not do so: anyone may and should improve an article, if they do it properly. If you do so, and think you clearly meet the objections posed by a tag, you can remove it. If you remove an otability tag and someone wants to challenge it, the best way for them to do so is at AfD . The best information, as always, is not just exhibitions, but artwork in the permanent collection of major museums. If this cannot be shown, major reviews are desirable. A long list of appearances in group exhibitions in my opinion adds little: I would limit it to the few most important. I'm not sure being a guest lecturer means anything unless it is a full term appointment, not an occasional lecture. DGG ( talk ) 00:50, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks David, I think I have a better idea now. So if I look at the "notability for artists" criteria "The person's work (or works) either (a) has become a significant monument, (b) has been a substantial part of a significant exhibition, (c) has won significant critical attention, or (d) is represented within the permanent collections of several notable galleries or museums.", there is in fact the following hierarchy with the possibility of 4 or 5 being challenged as "open to interpretation":

• 1. critical attention and museum collections with a list of "notable works" at each institution
• 2. critical attention and government distinction/awards, art at expo pavillion or Governor General's Award or the Order of Canada
• 3. critical attention and peer recognition ie elected member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art (RCA)
• 4. critical attention outside region, regional museums, plus newspaper bios, interviews
• 5. critical attention outside region, regional museums, plus minor awards

Is this a reasonable assessment? I'm finding that these take me a fair bit of time to do, so I appreciate your input. Thanks HeatherBlack (talk) 14:45, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

• You're trying to be rational. But the only practical definition of notability is what the consensus at a particular time considers important enough for an article in WP: it's an entirely empirical standard: whatever succeeds. Most of the rules are ambiguous & ill-defined, & we are in any case under no obligation to follow them. People at WP are not good at making fine distinctions or balancing multiple factors. Considering the various degrees or rationality and knowledgeability of people who engage in discussions, simple rules of thumb are better. It doesn't help to pass a formal standard if the net effect is not convincing. The goal is for a subject to be what I call "undoubtedly notable ", notable to the degree that no reasonable person who understands the field will challenge, or even better, obviously notable, that any one challenging it will not be taken seriously by anyone.

Having multiple works in major museums is in practice sufficient. Having these works get independent critical commentary is even better. For the sort of work that doesn't typically get into museums (such as street art or architecture), awards and commentary and official recognition are the equivalent.

The practical difficulties for the sort of articles you've been writing are 1/whether the museum is in fact a major collection, rather than the sort of civic collection which is not particularly discriminating with local artists 2/ whether the critical discussion is in fact substantial and independent. A museum's description of its own collection is not independent, unless the level of scholarship is universally recognized. Almost no commercial gallery's description of anything is reliable. Too many articles here depend on such descriptions, & it would be very easy to challenge them. (The classic example is the degree to which the association with Duveen might cast doubt on Berenson's objectivity). 3/ (which I think you recognize)--no provincial or municipal level award is meaningful. DGG ( talk ) 00:53, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Got it! I'll go back and improve the ones that I've already written. Thanks again HeatherBlack (talk) 20:34, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Notability

Hi DGG, You've nominated several of my articles for deletion or speedy deletion. I'm always careful to write neutrally and cite everything that I write. Obviously, I think the topics that I choose are notable, but you disagree with me on some points. I find the notability guidelines to be somewhat vague, so if a topic has enough information written about it in newspapers, magazines, or similar media to create a short article, then I go ahead and create one. Is there some other measure or guideline that you're using to determine notability? Are there a certain number of sources that you look for, or does a magazine need a certain amount of circulation? Guidance is appreciated. Thanks, HtownCat (talk) 17:52, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

I rather expected to hear from you, and I've delayed nominating further articles until I could see your response. There are two separate but linked problems in articles about organizations, their leaders, and their products: notability and promotionalism:

The basic problem of promotionalism is that WP is addressed to the potential readers, giving them the information they might want to know upon seeing mention of a subject (for example, at the most basic, where is that company and what does the company do?, or which organization is that & what do they advocate? ). A promotional article is addressed to a prospective user or purchaser or supporter: This is what we do, and here is why it is valuable that you buy our products or support our endeavors. Encyclopedia articles are characterised by plain description, promotional ones by praise, or the sort of detail one would need only if one is considering a purchase. Promotional articles are intended to give a favorable image of the company, such as describing its ostensible social purposes or community contributions.

the basic problem of notability is deciding whether something is worth describing in an encyclopedia at all. It doesn't correspond to importance in the world, but to whether it should be included in WP--we can;t after all judge the world, but we must decide what we want to put in our encyclopedia. . In a few cases we go by a general decision--for example, the decision that all named populated places are appropriate for articles. In some others, we go by outside evaluation: for example, that a holder of a distinguished professorship at a major university is notable, or someone chosen to compete in the Olympics. In many cases, there are no such firm standards, and we go by the WP:GNG, the general notability guideline, which requires substantial coverage by multiple independent third party reliable sources. (some people say this is the only real standard, and everything else is just an assumption of what will meet it). the key words there are "substantial" , "independent" , and "reliable." A substantial source is more than a product listing, or a mention of an event taking place, but a significant discussion, such as a full product review. How substantial it must be is of course a matter of judgment, which is decided by consensus at WP:AFD. An independent source is one not derived from the subject--not the subject's web page of product literature, or what its principals write, or the press releases the put out. A reliable source is one using editorial judgment, rather than simply publishing press releases or gossip. Again, these terms are matters of judgement to be decided at consensus.

In all but extreme cases. nobody can predict accurately how consensus will go--I will nominate an article for deletion if I think there is a substantial probability that it will not be considered suitable, --but even after 7 dears of experience at it , sometimes I am wrong, either because I made a misjudgment or because the community wishes to interpret things differently. The community decides, and another administrator judges what the community has decided. Guidelines are necessarily subject to interpretation, and what really matters is how the community decides to interpret them--after all, we make our own rules collectively, and we can decide how we want to use them , and if we want to make exceptions. The best way of learning this is to observe afd discussions on similar topics, to see what arguments succeed, and what the practical standards are.

Some things are deleted immediately, by the concurrence of two administrators, rather than an AfD. One relevant example is blatant promotionalism, which is an article so much devoted to advertising or promoting something that there appears no way to fix it without rewriting. (As an admin, I have the technical ability to do it without concurrence, but I rarely use it unless there is some immediate hazard, such as libel or copyvio) . We also immediately remove articles on people or companies where it seems obvious on the face of it there is no possible indication of any importance or significance, --a much less demanding standard than actual notability,. Again, normally two admins will concur in this. If such deletions are seriously disputed in good faith, most admins will reverse the decision and send the article to AfD for a community opinion.

I said there was a connection between the two: A key reason we have a notability standard is that for most things that are not notable, there is nothing much to say except directory information or promotion. It is critical to WP that it not become a mere directory or a place for advertisement--we want to provide information that people can trust, so we require sources and objectivity and some degree of significance. There are many other places on the web for advertising, and google does very nicely as a web directory.

There are additionally some factors that can affect how people here view an article. We tend to regard an attempt to write simultaneous articles about a borderline notable company, its products, and its executives likely to be an attempt at promotion--it is much better to have one strong article. Also , it is considered possible that someone writing articles about a wide range of barely notable subjects may be doing so as a paid editor. We do not absolutely prohibit this (though many people here would like to do so), but we strongly discourage it, because it is extremely difficult to be objective about what one writes with such a strong conflict of interest. If by any chance you are such an editor, I can explain to you how best to deal with it so as to get the articles accepted--I am one of the relatively few admins here who are willing to assist paid editors who come here openly in good faith and are willing to learn our standards. 'DGG (at NYPL) (talk) 21:29, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your detailed response. If I am not completely sure whether a subject is notable, should I submit it to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation?

I really thought I was careful about keeping promotionalism out of my articles. I would like to improve them, if given the chance. Is there a way that I can edit the deleted articles and then submit them for approval to be posted? I've read something about restoring articles to a userspace, but I'm not sure what the procedure is for that. I absolutely do want to contribute quality articles and nothing that other editors might view as promotional. Thanks for your help. HtownCat (talk) 20:02, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I will take a look next week. You should first check if there are good references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, because otherwise a rewrite is useless. DGG ( talk ) 04:19, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

update

With regard to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Emad Rahim, did you see "Is wikipedia for sale"?

Apparently Emad Rahim paid a PR firm to manage his wikipedia article.

Rahim paid Wiki-PR $1,500 over two installments to create a page for him on the site. “After reviewing all of my information [Wiki-PR] assured me that my profile would get published on Wikipedia without any problems. We wrote a short bio, included quotes and links to credible sources, publications, employment history, and a picture.” At first he was happy with the result, but within two weeks the page had come to the attention of other Wikipedia editors. Email exchanges show the extent to which Wiki-PR spun and obfuscated the issue. On July 17, Rahim emailed the firm after noticing that his page had been marked for deletion for not being notable enough. CEO Michael French replied, “You're covered by Page Management. Not to worry. Thank you for your patience with the encyclopedic process.”

So, how much does being outed as someone who paid to selfishly subvert the wikipedia add to his notability? Geo Swan (talk) 17:35, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Can one become notable for not being notable? Interesting concept... Peridon (talk) 18:00, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

we have had some AfD discussions on people & organizations whose notability arises in large part because of either criticism or attacks they have made upon WP; results vary--my own view has consistently been that as part of NPOV we should always in case of doubt be careful not to remove information about those who don't like us.

But in this particular instance, this is a person who has without malice towards us made the error of hiring a firm whose practice it is to evade the principles of WP; This would fall under BLP policy. This is minor negative information, not relating to whatever actual notability he might have. Even if he were to have an article, I would not include this material--it's a basic BLP policy that we do not include the misdemeanors of basically private individuals, let alone use them as the basis for notability. DGG ( talk ) 00:29, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

• Okay. Thanks. Geo Swan (talk) 00:46, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Your comment

at Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC for AfC reviewer permission criteria was excellent and what we obviously don't want is poor reviews being pushed on to NPP where the reviewing isn't any better or faster. Based on comments from Foudation staff (whether posting from their WMF account or not), software help is unlikely to be forthcoming from MedWiki and I think our volunteer programmers at AfC are quite capable of finding a local solution of some kind or another. It just needs the community to decide on a simple set of of permission criteria instead of attempting to re-debate the whole thing, or completely missing the objective of the discussion proposal. I think, based on the discussion, most of which is objective, I'll start a straw poll there on some of the realistic suggestions. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:23, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Rick DePiro

The search terms on the reward board are actually excellent leads for promo articles that need cleanup. I've been working down the list. For this article, a "Media appearances" section is promotional and most of the article is unsourced. It could be cut in half. I noticed there is an active disclosed PR rep on Talk from A&R (which I use to work for about 10 years ago) and I wish to avoid the usual accusations of sniping other COIs. That narrative is apparently convincing to at least some editors. I'll keep working down the search results, but thought you may have an interest in cleaning up this one. CorporateM (Talk) 13:53, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

I am not comfortable working in that field, because I know so little I cannot tell if what I cut out is unimportant, or whether when I rewrite, I have rewritten correctly, But I too have been looking at articles previously advertised there. DGG ( talk ) 19:09, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Library holdings

Hello DGG! Thank you for your note at my talk page, I appreciate the feedback. I will look at those articles you listed this weekend and do some cleanup on them. I'll also try to be more mindful of promotionalism in the future. I'm curious about your technique of judging notability by library holdings, as in the Jedediah Bila AfD - it seems useful especially for pre-internet authors. Do you use Worldcat to find that information? How many libraries do you think are necessary for notability? --Cerebellum (talk) 01:51, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

I use WorldCat most of the time. But WorldCat requires interpretation for 5 factors: First, it covers mainly US and Canadian libraries, with a lesser coverage for the UK and Australia and New Zealand, a very scanty coverage of Western Europe, and little else, so it requires careful interpretation when used elsewhere. Second, it covers almost entirely English language books, for in the US only the largest academic libraries buy anything else. Third, it covers current holdings, so what libraries had 50 years ago is not represented, so for older books of shorter spans of interest such as popular fiction it requires correction also. Fourth, how many titles count for a book to be likely notable depends on the type of book-- mainstream novels and important nonfiction are much more represented than esoteric subjects. I go by the experience of having looked for many books of all sorts, and one can do the equivalent by comparison with books known to be notable. (I have sometimes used comparisons to say that a work is or is not a major work in a field) As a fifth factor: editions must be combined to get a true picture, and the way libraries report holdings this is not always easy. As a result I usually report holdings as approximate figures. For major current works in popular interest academic subjects like economics, a notable book would have at least several hundred. For experimental fiction that fits no standard genre, only a few dozen libraries might buy it, but it can be just as important. For fan-oriented books on games, libraries usually buy very little, because they get outdated very quickly. For some of the kinkier sexual topics, libraries don't buy at all. A scattering of small libraries often indicates author gift copies.

The official WP standard is book reviews. But library holding correlate nicely with book reviews, because libraries buy largely on the basis of such reviews, especially for public libraries.

Outside the US, holdings can be gotten from the catalogs listed at WP:Booksources But none have nearly the depth of coverage in their own countries that WorldCat does in the US. -- but there is the very powerful consolidated search facility of Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog at [6]. DGG ( talk ) 03:41, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Response to proposed deletion of Kavi Workspace page

DGG, thank you for your attention to the Kavi Workspace page. I have removed the proposed deletion notice, but I will of course abide by whatever decisions are made. I have reviewed the guidelines for creating Wikipedia content at some length and feel that I have a solid grasp of the principles. In creating the page, I have tried to emulate and be parallel to other software product pages linked from List of collaborative software. Many parallel pages seem also to lack significant levels of notability, or refer simply to articles generated by press releases or commercial web sites. Projectplace (software), Telligent, and ProtoShare are three of many examples. I have reviewed Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies). Do you have recommendations for how to proceed? Thank you. MisterPendrake (talk) 19:46, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

many parallel pages ought to be deleted also. Not all, of course--it depends on the importance of the company, now or in the past. we measure that here by references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, print or online, but not blogs or press releases, or material derived from press releases. For products like this, the most convincing references are substantial independent signed product reviews in publications of acknowledged responsibility and authority, (but not mere notices or announcements). If you can add them, the article is not likely to be deleted. Otherwise it probably will be. If I (or anyone) think that they have still not been added adequately in a few days, I will nominate the article for discussion at WP:AFD. The consensus of the community as expressed there about whether it meets the guidelines will decide, as judged by some other administrator. Good luck with it--I hope you are able to show it notable by our standards.

Of the pages you mention, one seems to be adequately sourced, and two less adequately, but I (and possibly others who may happen to see this) will take another look at all three of them. A great many insufficiently notable articles have been aded in the past, and we ought to remove them if they can not be improved sufficiently.At the very least, we do not want to add to their number. DGG ( talk ) 20:20, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. In lieu of signed product reviews in publications, I submit that the product page earns its notability on the basis of its use. Specifically, it is used widely in the US standards development community. Good examples of entities that rely on the product are the OASIS Open organization, INCITS, and many other ANSI-accredited organizations. The smooth functioning of these organizations and their consensus-driven output relies on the product. While the product does not warrant mainstream press, it does warrant the attention and participation of a large number of technical professionals who use it daily to conduct committee work that results in important American standards. Can this level of participation justify inclusion?

I am seeking parity with other product pages. To explore the comparison further, Sharepoint is a collaboration environment which underlies a large range of business activity, some of it important, some not. As a part of the Microsoft portfolio, it garners large amounts of attention. But as a product, it is not inherently any more important than any other development environment. In the case of Workspace, it is a niche product performing a specialized function in an activity generally considered important to the US economy. I submit this line of reasoning for your consideration and ask that it be entered into the debate. Is there a more direct way to do that than here on your talk page? MisterPendrake (talk) 04:42, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

This is WP, a community project, that has no way of expertly judging anything.. WP was built on the principle on relying on what other publications said, those that do have expert editing. If they cover something in a substantial way we include it , and we include what they say. It was almost universally thought 12 years ago that in the absence of such expertise a reliable encyclopedia could not be constructed. Nonetheless this seems to have worked, worked much better than any of those who started it, or anyone else for that matter , would possibly have imagined. It is not the only way to make an encyclopedia, but it is the way this particular one is being made, Those who have chosen to work on it, almost all of us volunteers, are fundamentally determined to see it through--to see how far we can carry this concept.

To avoid expert judgment of our own, we avoid considering intrinsic importance. Other publications in the world do, and we rely on them. I sometimes get impatient at the apparent indifference to common sense and the occasional inconsistency that the implies, but I have to acknowledge that it does seem to work. Even were you to persuade me otherwise, all that I could say is that it would be necessary to start another encyclopedia on a different principle. Neither I nor anyone here would want to take the chance of compromising what we have done with our current way of working, for we have done collectively something which nobody ever thought ordinary humans collectively could accomplish. I dreamed of this as a child, and it is amazing to see it accomplished only half a century later in my own lifetime. .

We do not try to meet every need; we try to meet the needs of those who find what we are doing worthwhile. Among the people whose needs it does not meet are those who seek recognition or publicity for what has not yet been recognized in external reliable sources.

So much for the rhetoric. You come here to ask my advice, and I would not be honest if I did not give you the most accurate advice I can give about what will happen here, based upon my seven years experience working primarily with incoming challenged articles. Regardless of your desires or mine, the article will be deleted without the sort of sources people here consider necessary. I've told you what they are. if they're not here by monday, I will do what I am supposed to do , and list the article for discussion.

I am not going to go into a debate and say things other than I think. I shall say it does not seem to meet our guidelines, and let others argue as they will and decide what to do with it. You can enter what you like into the debate, but I don't think anyone has ever succeeded with an argument along your lines, and I have seen hundreds of people try. It may be much less than your merits deserve, but it's what will happen; the experience of others is the best predictor. DGG ( talk ) 06:40, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your help about "How to do it and avoid deletions"

Blueena (talk) 04:58, 4 January 2014 (UTC)Though most of the articles I've created are being proposed for deletion, it's really happy to receive your message about "how to do it and avoid deletions". The message includes many detailed suggestions and I believe it must have taken you a lot time. Once again, many thanks!

WP: Exhibitions

In light of the increase in GLAM projects internationally, I'd like to start a new WikiProject, WP:Exhibitions to help coordinate activities around major museum and gallery exhibitions. If you are interested in the project, please contact me here or on my talk page. I'm hoping to establish guidelines for creating, editing, and tagging articles on major exhibitions and to begin improving articles in this area of Wikipedia. OR drohowa (talk) 19:42, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

See conversation at User talk:OR drohowa#WP:Exhibitions for my convo with JohnBod on this Project. Hoping for more responses also on the various other WikiProjects I posted on asking for comments/support.. OR drohowa (talk) 18:25, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

I am fresh out of wiki kittens; please accept this cake as a thank you for your support, kind words and thoughtful comments during my (now withdrawn) RfA. What doesn't kill me... Cheers, Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:25, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Question regarding notability: Young Australian of the Year award

Hi DGG, I noticed you recently nominated several articles for AfD (for example Poppy King), citing mainly that the Young Australian of the Year Award does not confer notability. I would like to know what you base this argument upon? The recipients of this honour are selected by the National Australia Day Council and endorsed by the Australian Government in exactly the same way as the main award. The presentation to the winner is made by the Prime Minister of Australia at the same nationally televised ceremony as Australian of the Year. The recipients are also VIP guests at the Flag raising ceremony alongside the Governor-General of Australia and Australia Day ceremonial activities. Based on the criteria for nomination for the award, many of the recipients are already notable enough to have attracted national attention prior to receiving it, and winners will almost always be the subject of ongoing national media attention. As an Australian who lives in Canberra, the only outward difference I can see between Australian of the Year and young/senior Australian of the year is the age limits for these categories and one less televised speech at the flag raising ceremony. Looking at the deletion discussions, it appears a large majority of other editors also feel the award is highly notable, if not as notable as Australian of the Year. Dfadden (talk) 22:55, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Three lines of argument: First, most of them have done very little by the time of the award, thought about half have notable careers later. Many of the awards of of the human interest variety-- "how remarkable to do something of that so young" , where the notable section is "so young" but the achievement otherwise unremarkable. Second, I consider that material for tabloids, not encyclopedia, and I have consistently opposed accepting "human interest" except on a greater than national scale, as a basis for coverage in WP. Third, we have consistently not accepted youth championships in almost anything as notable, nor youth awards in any field at all. Even what I regard as the most famous of all--indeed possibly qualifying for being famous at an international level-- the Rhodes Scholarships, are not accepted for notability.

I would on the other hand be perfect willing to see a broadening of our notability policy across the board, including such aspects as youth. We're not paper, and as long as we can exclude promotionalism , there's no real limit to the depth we can cover (that's our problem will small companies, or locally important professionals--if we included them, the article would inevitably be promotional , or at least look like they were. this level. When we broaden coverage, such thing as youthful importance could be included. When we accept participation in a division I American College football game as notability the way we do professional football, and accept such things as the Rhodes, I'lll accept these also. WP can cover a broad as field as people wish it to, but there should be some degree of consistency.

The degree of fuss made at a ceremony is not notability. The ceremonies should be included, and they are, in or articles on the awards. It would seem perfectly reasonable to do as we do, and include all the names.

I nominated the ones I did as a test to see what the community thinks, when one attracted by notice as being totally unremarkable. The consensus will decide, and based on what they do here, I will continue or let it be. I do not regard myself as the arbiter of notability -- the community does what it wants to do. Thre are many areas where I would prefer the consensus to be different, but once I know that I do not spend my time in fighting them. I only make suggestions, and sometimes, like now, simply try probers to elucidate the standards. DGG ( talk ) 00:17, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

I appreciate the response, and respect your consistency in applying the same standards. I think in this case however (and granted my objectivity may be clouded by a subconscious patriotism) this is more than just a youth award. Nominees have to do something considered exceptional by both the community at large as well as the Australian Government to be considered eligible and while age is certainly a qualifying factor, the achievements are more often than not notable in their own right. Certainly, I reject any parallels to junior or reserve grade football players who are undeniably good at what they do and entertaining to watch, but are rarely motivated beyond self-interest to succeed at football - one of the criteria for this award is that the achievements are not self-serving (Poppy's case is not the strongest example I admit, but she identified a niche market and creating domestic employment and growth in any industry otherwise dominated by foreign interests - indeed she profited from the venture, but in doing so benefitted others and the National identity. Her age and the fact the company later failed are separate issues). With the articles in question it is more a case of them being poorly written and referenced so as not to highlight why they recipients achievements are notable, and I can see why you would challenge them. But as you said, the Wikipedia community will decide the standard that should be applied. Dfadden (talk) 01:06, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

You said that "the achievements are more often than not notable in their own right," and I certainly agree that at least they sometimes are. In those cases, I would support notability, and consider the award as a contributing factor--but not the same automatic factor the adult award does. DGG ( talk ) 04:23, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

C)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Professor Michael Nimier

Dear DGG: When I found this page at first I assumed that this was a notable professor and started to look for sources. The first one I found was [THIS]. Does this make him more or less notable? —Anne Delong (talk) 03:17, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

More so, but it will be rather tricky to write a proper article. As you will see, I've started rewriting, but this is one of the situations where it will be necessary to verify the degrees claimed, as no trust may be placed in their web site. DGG ( talk ) 02:56, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Thomas Straub

Dear DGG: I came across this old Afc submission, but I'm not having any luck figuring out if he's notable. Want to try? —Anne Delong (talk) 19:33, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

nor am I sure. Some of the various Swiss business schools and their faculty are difficult to judge. I think this needs a more general discussion, and I am trying to decide whether to send to MfD, or accept and send to AfD. It will get more attention at AfD, but doing it that way is a rather unusual route. DGG ( talk ) 05:17, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

User:Wjpierce3/sandbox

Restored as requested, the creator basically just kept reposting the same text. Good luck Jimfbleak - talk to me? 04:57, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

in process of rewriting

Talk page length

Hallo David, I recognise that you have the right to do what you want with your talk page, but as someone who regularly checks her watchlist on a small not-very-smartphone (no selfrespecting teen would have one) with poor rural data connection, could I ask you to rethink? It takes an age to load before the TOC appears, and then a lot of scrolling to get to the recent messages. How about having some sort of automatic "holding pen" for non-current discussions, from which you could manually archive at leisure?

Your talk page has many watchers, as a place where interesting and wise comments are made, but it's very hard work reading it on a small screen. (Have you tried?) Best wishes, PamD 07:34, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

(Stalking) sometimes they are hard work viewed on a 17" screen ;) Cheers all! Irondome (talk) 22:25, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

getting there now, I hope DGG ( talk ) 01:38, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks: down from 667k and 346 threads when I commented, to 597k and 288 threads today! I'm sure your 739 page watchers will be grateful. PamD 09:24, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Advice on a bold endeavor

Recently I came up with an idea that is fairly bold. I want to create a sub-encyclopedia within Wikipedia where articles that might not meet WP:GNG, but have multiple independent third party sources, can be retained. Has such an endeavor been attempted and do you think this will garner support? Valoem ^{talk contrib} 18:32, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

It would have to be done as a supplement or superset of WP, because I doubt we'd ever approve putting it within enWP.

I've proposed a similar enterprise:

What I suggest is a 'Wikipedia Two - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in.

It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. It would include every ball game in a season.

This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists would have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists would have it not rejected. Newcomers would have an open and accepting place for a initial experience.

But it would be interesting to see a search option:

Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable (WP)?

Anyone care to guess which people would choose?

Your proposal is more limited because of the multiple independent sources requirement. If you interpret "independent" as we do to exclude press releases, and keep the reliable and "significant" sourcing requirement, it would have only the content that meets GNG, but is excluded for some other reason. This would include subjects excluded by those Special notability guidelines that are interpreted as additional requirements beyond GNG, and also those excluded by whichever parts of WP:NOT you thought unnecessary, such as NOT NEWS. If you do not require "reliable" sources with "significant" coverage, it would also include subjects with only directory information. This is a relatively limited body of material, I worded my proposal to ask only sufficient sourcing to show WP:V, which need not be either multiple or independent.

The problem both proposals still would have is promotionalism. Though NPOV should eliminate it, in practice we also need WP:N to remove the fundamentally advertising entries.

And a great deal can be done within existing rules: WP:N, NPOV and NOT depend a great deal upon interpretation, and some interpretation is unavoidable, because various parts of these and other relevant guidelines contradict each other. If all provisions are interpreted as broadly as possible, it comes near to not having any limitations; if as narrowly as possible, the result closely resembles a traditional encyclopedia. DGG ( talk ) 20:17, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Sound good, I couldn't have said it better myself. For inclusion in this subset, I am requiring at least one RS and two non-RS, or 5 independent unreliable sources. A restriction where only editors with special privileges such as reviewer, autopatrollers, and rollbacker can create new articles may be necessary. The article can be quickly deleted if it is unsourced, or has only primary sources to prevent editors with COI or promotional intent on creating an article (though restricting the type of editor should prevent this). I understand that this is a very ambitious proposal whose ultimate goal is to protect certain articles which fail AfC or AfD but pass WP:V. It seems inefficient to delete an article forcing a new editor to start from scratch. I was going to usurp the user name Omnipedia for this purpose. I think the best option going forward is to start a WikiProject on this! But just to clarify nothing like this has been attempt before, correct? Valoem ^{talk contrib} 20:52, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

I don;t really like counting references of various sorts to determine notability. Refs. are not divided between RS and non-RS, but there's a spectrum;there are sources reliable only for WP:V but not for /m== notability; sources reliable only within a field; sources reliable, but not for negative BLP; the special characteristics need for WP:MEDRES; sources reliable depending on who wrote the particular item; sources where one source alone is unquestionable notability in some but not all fields; sources reliable only for local events, and vice-versa; primary sources that speak for themselves and those needing interpretation; specific parts of articles on fiction that can be sourced from the works themselves, and those that cannot; and so on. Similarly for all the other necessary characteristics--even copyvio is not black and white in all cases.

More important, I don't want to rely upon sourcing for determining notability , but rather upon the actual characteristics of the subject where possible. Some of this is already accepted here: the Schools compromise, WP:PROF, politicians, athletes, popular music; aircraft accidents; geographic features; even news events. we're starting to accept it for companies listed on stock exchanges, for some exchanges, as music charting depends on some charts but not others. I would expand this to every situation where we can find a logical separation that corresponds to the actual criterion, which is what we want to include for a particular subject field. I would prefer to accept a very limited role for the GNG as a backup, I see a continual trend in this direction over by 7.5 years here, and it is very satisfying. It's not that this leads to wider inclusion--in some fields the effect is the opposite. The virtue is that it avoids debates, especially debates whose result is dependent not on the facts or the merits, but the work people put into the argument, and upon who shows up to talk about it. We only make good decisions either when many people are involved, or where it is in practice left to the specialists.

As some particular points: first, passing AfC is not a determination based on actual criteria of its own, but rather on whether the article is likely to accepted at AfD, because if it isn;t there is no point to it. There is no reason anyway to have a special standard, since anyone who pleases can bypass afc, and about as many people do so as wait until it is accepted (that's why there are relatively few complaints about reviewing compared to the number of bad reviews). Second, the question of keeping potential drafts around for people to work on is a different one from the entire question of the level for accepting articles. It has not been solved. I tried very hard to limit G13 to those subjects which would never m,ake acceptable articles or where what is written would be of no help whatsoever, but I failed. I hope though the actual standard for using G13 rather than postponing may take some account of this. The Drafts namespace has some potential to let us rethink this. Third, I would not attempt to do what I have suggested (or what you have suggested) within WP. I do not want to change our basic way of working, but rather just adjust it. We have a project here successful beyond the wildest imagination of anyone, including those most devoted to it. Fourth, I especially would not change WP in general to accommodate any particular sort of article even those I have my heart most set on. The better way to go about this is by gradually adjusting interpretation. Fifth, the basic need for another project is not a wider inclusiveness--the web itself does rather well for that--the ned for something to be formally published in order to be disseminated has vanished over the last 20 years. Rather, the basic need is for great reliability and intellectual sophistication. The WP model only works for this either when many people are involved on something they are about, or where it is in practice left to the specialists. At the same time I joined WP I joined Citizendium, intending to work in parallel. Unfortunately the leadership there made it impossible (and I judged WP the better environment with the greater potential). I'd love to start again. Just as with much greater inclusiveness, I think this best done outside WP as a fork., Sixth, the need for restricting article creation is real, and it's not just creation that will be affected, because there are multiple often exploited possibilities for perverting the nature of an article. At some point I think we may be forced to choose between the two incompatible principles of "anyone can edit" and NPOV. I'd go for keeping NPOV--without anyone can edit we will be limited, but without NPOV, we're not even an encyclopedia. I doubt the WMF will permit this within WP, and I think this our greatest overall threat. It's this that may force a fork, I would estimate in about 4 or 5 years. DGG ( talk ) 02:10, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Wow, that's quite a response! It's no coincidence that I completely agree and have felt this way since I registered. I've noticed every editor has an inherent bias toward one topic or another. My recent DRVs (Dieselpunk, The Halal Guys, No call, no show) and AfD's have highlighted such occurrences. In fact my current DRV with UFOs is an example of such, JzG voted a IDONTLIKEIT as a reason for deletion completely disregarding my sources. Editors seems more content on removing information than actually researching as the latter is easier. I've always found this to be counter-intuitive to what we are trying to create and have registered the user DeepWikipedia (which I cannot use) as a method of storing articles where the AfD seems political rather than academic. Eventually, this may realize into something more ambitious, for now a simple guideline for inclusion can be defined. This guideline is based not on sources, but discussion.

Any article currently deleted, but has survived at least one AfD (no consensus included) is eligible for inclusion.

Many of these articles resurface regardless and at least adherent to Wikipedia guidelines in article structure, to retain their information for further improvement seems lawfully beneficially to the super objective of this encyclopedia. My personal guideline are similar to yours, must be NPOV, V by RS. Notability is an organic guideline that is ever-changing so to follow it strictly can be complex at times. WP:TOOSOON and rules as such can be redundant.

Recently I noticed crusades against entire genres when a guideline for inclusion is raised far about the GNG requirements. For me to even pretend this benefits Wikipedia is impossible. This user space can be an area for those articles in the event when guidelines are lower. Does such a task require approval from WMF? Thanks for the input! Valoem ^{talk contrib} 22:07, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

It is reasonable for the coverage of different areas in WP to be different. It reflects the interests of its contributors, who are predominantly early adult males, and the subjects they are primarily interested in will be covered more heavily. But it also reflects the interests of any relatively organized group of hobbyists (or conceivable academics) who are prepared to work on articles. There are also limitations due to sources: in some fields, there are no easily available free sources in the internet,which is all most of the contributors use. But even for more competent research, there are fields with no printed sources at all, and fields which where they do exist, but are thoroughly unreliable.

Your question, however, is about prejudice in different subjects. WP does have some overall biases: the users are predominantly secular moderately liberal technologically interested people, and subjects which are not taken seriously by this group will have difficulties. This is a problem in many areas: the traditional humanities, business and industry, radical politics, religion, are all under-represented. This will only be solved if it is solved at all by broader participation.

The notability standards in different fields are different, for the nature of notability in different fields is intrinsically not really comparable. The GNG was seen as the equalizer, but is has become recognized that the density of sources can lead to undesired results when measured by either common sense, or the general desires of the contributors. Used literally as the only standard, it will give an extremely large coverage to what is in the newspapers, which is largely the major sports and some forms of popular entertainment. Even those very interested is such subjects by and large have come to agree that it needs to be somewhat modified. The straightforward way of dealing with it, as I mentioned above, is abstract standards, which we use is some cases. The other way is by manipulating the interpretation of the key words in the GNG: significant, reliable sources, independent. This permits both flexibility and room for endless argument. This is be used both to correct for our biases, and to reinforce them. We get the result we collectively want: we make the rules, we decide on the interpretation, we judge the exceptions.

I support such modifications when they yields the result I want. Sometimes it does, sometimes not, sometimes to a limited extent The decision process can use improvement: at present the practical operation of the consensus method favors the stubborn and clever. We need to concentrate more on the true meaning of consensus, which is a solution that everyone can live with, not necessarily a compromise. One of the things anyone must agree to live with is that their preferences will often be rejected. If the community wanted to cover UFOs more, it would adjust the interpretations accordingly.

The area that concerns you is pseudoscience. WP most certainly has a bias against pseudoscience and fringe, and I personally share it. An encyclopedia is a device to provide information about the world, and is intrinsically linked with a rational approach to subjects. But the way we manifest this outlook has some problems. In my view, the way to properly deal with these subjects is to deal with them thoroughly: if they are explained properly, people will understand their nature. But some WPedians would rather limit the degree to which we cover them, in the apparent hope that people will therefore think them inconsequential. In my view, the presentations should be unbiased, which necessarily relies upon presenting the subject in its own light, as well as that of its critics. Some WPedians here oppose this, apparently thinking that people will come to the wrong conclusions if the proponents are allowed to speak for themselves. Some WPedians even want to label the articles right at the top, so people will start reading with the appropriate view. Taking the position that the criticism must be highlighted to ensure a scientific point of view represents an irrational fear that a logical and balanced presentation will be misunderstood; it represents a distrust of the ability of the scientific method to convince people, to stand on its own without artificial rhetorical assistance. Arbcom has to some extent supported the positions I deplore, and all I can do is try to prevent them from being applied with full rigor. But there is good reason for some degree of caution, and it was those good reasons which motivated arbcom: without some protection, the articles can become dominated by the true believers, who can form a group of editors with no desire for balance, and who in some cases utterly reject the use of logic and science as a method of proof. Most such groups now have greatly reduced influence than they did 7 years ago, possibly to some extent by bending the rules, but to a greater extent in at least some fields by the greater participation of rational interested people. .

You are arguing in a way that I cautioned you against: altering the basic rules in order to favor your subject, or to keep it from disfavor. There will be no support for this here, and even I would support it only outside WP. The only approach that will deal with prejudice here is the gradual effort to convince people to apply the rules a little differently, with the recognition that success is not likely in the short run.

User space can legitimately be used to preserve articles, but the consensus is that it can only been done if there is some prospect of improvement, and for a limited period (6 months seems to be standard) The approach for those who wish to favor their subject beyond what the community will support that is normally suggested here is already in existence: Wikia, but this of course makes the material much less prominent. The WMF would not interfere is we wanted to keep rejected articles longer, except to the extent they were copyvio or BLP or extreme promotionalism. Their role is to enforce the core values,not the details. Some of us think they have not gone far enough for some of these values, other think they have sometimes gone too far into detail. My own view is that they need to take action about promotionalism , but have been too prescriptive about fair use and some elements of blp.

The difficulty then is convincing the community. I think the people here think in general that the indefinite preservation of such articles would primarily benefit promotionalism and autobiography, and I share that view. DGG ( talk ) 17:23, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

I think you and I have each said enough about this for now, and I'd like to close the discussion. DGG ( talk ) 18:56, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Urgent Advice required

Hi,DGG I really need your help with reference to Felix Tataru page. I need to recreate it and I need to know what was wrong. Felix Tataru is Senior Vice President of International Advertising Association IAA Board of Directors, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Advertising_Association. I was carefull to have notable sources for the uploaded content. Could it be a problem the fact that sources were in Romanian? would it be a solution to edit first other pages on Wikipedia whith activities related to Felix Tataru? Cristina Butunoi (talk) 17:06, 28 April 2014 (UTC) Cristina Butunoi

There are two questions: can an article be written on him, and is the present article acceptable.

A Wikipedia article needs to show notability with references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, print or online, but not blogs or press releases, or material derived from press releases. If you have such sources, it may be possible to rewrite the article; otherwise, it will not be possible to write an acceptable article. There are two problems with your sources; I notice almost all your sources come from industry blog, and some from the online versions of industries newsletters. This are not in general reliable sources, because they publish every press release that gets sent to them, without serious editorial control. An examination of some of them indicates that what they are publishing is indeed press releases. The second problem is that most of them are about his company, not him. This can be hard to distinguish for advertising agencies, but you would probably have more success writing an article about the agency. And I point out that being vice-president of an organization is never notable. And in a biography everything must be referenced--his political work was not.

A Wikipedia article needs to be written like an encyclopedia article, not a press release--don't praise the organization or person, say what they do. Don't include material that would better belong in a web page, such as minor information about his ctivities that would interest nobody but his family.

Include only material that would be of interest to a general reader coming across the mention of the subject and wanting the sort of information that would be found in an encyclopedia. Do not include material that would be of interest only to those associated with the subject, or to prospective clients/purchasers/students/supporters/donors--that sort of content is considered promotional.

As a general rule, a suitable page will be best written by someone without Conflict of Interest; it's not impossible to do it properly with a conflict of interest or as a paid press agent, but it's relatively more difficult: you are automatically thinking in terms of what the subject wishes to communicate to the public, but an uninvolved person will think in terms of what the public might wish to know. And keep in mind that the goal of an encyclopedia is to say things in a concise manner, which is not the style of press releases or web sites, which are usually more expansive. I cannot insist on your telling me whether you are a paid editor, but I wonder why you "need" to recreate it.

If you think you can do it right according to our guidelines, do so, but expect the article to be carefully checked for objectivity, and for the presence of sources that show notability. The best way of rewriting is to use the WP:Article Wizard, which will guide you towards an acceptable article if one is possible.

For further information see our general guides to writing articles, WP:PLAIN and WP:FIRST; see also our list of the things we don't do here, WP:NOT, and our practical guide to conflict of interest, WP:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide

And one warning: Do not add material about him to other web pages. That is considered spamming, and people who do that are generally blocked.

Again, my best advice is to write an article on the company. DGG ( talk ) 18:29, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your input. It is very much appreciate it. I understand what you say about the style, but I do not understand about the sources. There aren't any blogs or online newsletters. Most of them are online versions of business newspapers and magazines in Romania. I may have been wrong about it as I did not include the author and the complete name of the article when I cited. I also understand that being a vice-de of an organization is not notable, but being a president of a global organization is considerend a notable information? As he will become president in 2016 because elected Senior vice president automatically becomes its president of the future mandate. Would not this be a reason enough to have this profile now? As regards the conflict of interest, I transparently showed my identity. I work for the companby and I thought it would be usefull to have this profile before an important international congress taking place next week. Cristina Butunoi (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 16:26, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Based on what you say, the article is fixable. I will take another look tomorrow in more detail. DGG ( talk ) 03:57, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for the effort you put into the close at WT:MOS#Bird common name capitalisation. There were a lot of words to read and to write. Keep up the good work. SchreiberBike talk 03:57, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. It was a sprawling debate that'd been going on in multiple forums for so long it's hard to get a complete sense of it without a lot of reading. Thanks for putting in the time and thinking it through.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:00, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Hear, hear! A very generous donation of time to get your mind round a long-long-long meandering debate with loads of distractions, and very brave to tackle one where people feel so strongly. I think you did an excellent job. --Stfg (talk) 10:14, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Right, you're off my Xmas card li- As much as I hate the result, I appreciate with the time and effort put in to possibly one of the most detailed closing rationales I have read. Despite apparent appearances to the contrary, I do support the idea of a global Manual of Style and conformity and am content to abide by the decision. Agree with the idea of some sort of bot to enact this. Cheers, Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:28, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

I would have preferred a different outcome, but your arguments were really well-done and respectful to all positions. Kudos for you. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:26, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

• Thank you, DGG. You've put a very contentious issue to rest, and probably for good. As ever, I'm flattered when people think I'm you. --BDD (talk) 16:16, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

A very most excellent example of gentle mop-wielding, though I am sure that some members of the species Gallus domesticus minoris will consider that the end of the Wikipedia is nigh. Guy (Help!) 19:41, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Ditto, I just wanted to thank you as well although I followed the discussion from a distance (I think it had more than enough active participants). Admins can get a lot of flack but when one takes on settling such a sprawling debate, knowing that no matter what one decides, there will be some very unhappy editors, I can only say thanks. And providing such a thoughtful rationale (rather than a sentence-long decision), is admirable and helps the decision "stick"...ambiguity would have only resulted in further challenges to your decision. Instead, if individuals do want to overturn this decision, they know that the burden of providing evidence resides with those wishing to change the status quo, and there has to be a substantial case to do so. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:14, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

I am hoping that you won't need to clarify that the consensus finding doesn't only apply to birds, but you might; there's a (smaller and quieter) camp who want to always capitalize moths/butterflies and dragonflies, and another in favor of doing the same with common names of British (and I think Australian) plants. The debate may have focused on birds, but that focus should be scene as license to capitalize non-bird species common names.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:39, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Paradigm shift from transformative to informative learning

I have some misgivings about this, but since you appear to accept that it's neither WP:OR (my deletion) nor a G12 copyright violation (1 May deletion by a different admin), I have, of course, restored. Cheers, Jimfbleak - talk to me? 05:29, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

BTW, thank you for your closing of the capitalisation debate. It's not the outcome I would have wanted, and the fifth pillar is looking increasingly irrelevant, but I think you handled the closure very well. Jimfbleak - talk to me? 12:54, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Advice on UFO sightings in outer space

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/UFO sightings in outer space (3rd nomination)

As an editor whose opinion I value, I was looking for some advice on this AfD and how to proceed. Despite snowing through DRV it turns out the reverse is happening at the AfD. The community seems to have an issue with this article which I am not following. The article has been accused of WP:SYNTH and OR, all claims are cited, I am unable to see any OR, and the article jumps to no conclusions. None of the opponents have specified any specify OR or synth. The information was juxtaposed which as far as I can tell is what SYNTH is not. The sources despite what I am seeing as mainstream have been denied. My goal was to document the reports of sightings of unidentified objects in space not suggesting they are extraterrestrial in origin.

Per WP:NFRINGE,

A fringe subject is considered notable enough for a dedicated article if it has been referenced extensively, and in a serious and reliable manner, in at least one major publication that is independent of their promulgators and popularizers. References that debunk or disparage the fringe view can be adequate, as they establish the notability of the theory outside of its group of adherents

Regardless of a hoax or not I am see significant coverage including two prominent skeptical analysts James Oberg and the Condon Report, as well as coverage from numerous reliable sources. Are there any serious issues with this article I am missing, or is the AfD based on IDONTLIKEIT votes? Valoem ^{talk contrib} 18:07, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Valoem, I will take a look. But i find it helpful if when someone asks me to look at an ongoing discussion they do not tell me what to look for. I try as best I can to just look as if I came upon it from scratch and ignore the suggestions, but I can't help being influenced by them subliminally. DGG ( talk ) 23:12, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Having made my comment, I think your evaluation of the reason for deletion is perfectly correct, but motives are not a helpful argument. DGG ( talk ) 23:20, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

I thank you so very much for your opinion. I always trust your judgment for or against my position. I will never have any issues if you disagree with me in the future as I find whatever you say insightful and educational :). Sorry to take more of your time, but I noticed that user LuckyLouie has essentially gutted most of the article. Correct me if I am wrong, but while we cannot use primary sources to establish notability, we can use them to expand the article, is his removal of sources policy? I also believe the tone of this article has changed and is no longer NPOV. He claims that these sightings are completely disproved when sources state otherwise. He has removed some cited first hand interviews with astronauts and I feel this version should be restored. I feel the same about this separate issue. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 16:29, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Issues have been resolved and consensus has been reached! Once again thanks for all your help. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 19:46, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Russell Targ

Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering about including an article subject's papers? I thought that we generally do not include a list of papers published except in the article body when a particular paper is specifically discussed as per coverage in a reliable independent source? There is also some discussion about COI issues on the talk page. Anyway, hopefully I won't drag you into any conflict or morass (what is the plural of morass?) but I saw it on my watch list and was wondering about the policy on published papers. You seemed a good person to ask. Thanks. Candleabracadabra (talk) 23:04, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

In dealing with an academic, we usually list all their books, and, if in a field where notability depends on published papers, (optionally) their most important papers. generally judging by citations. This is a special case, where it is necessary to show that he has credibility as a scientist, regardless of the quality of his work in parapsychology. I'd add citation data, and leave them in. I would especially leave in the papers relating to parapsychology that were published in mainstream journals. More important, we should be presenting his work, including what other people think of it, but not with a POV of trying to debunk it. I think the manner of inclusion of his views on Geller prejudicial. The opinions of others about Geller belongs in the article on Geller, not here. Please copy to the talk p. if you think it helpful DGG ( talk ) 23:29, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Interesting. Thanks. Leaving in "most important papers" certainly creates a large gray area. There was some discussion of citations on the talk page, so I will leave those already involved to resolve the issues. The citation numbers also seems a potential problem, because doesn't it depend a lot on how popular a particular subject is? I realize popularity is a measure of influence, but I'm not sure it's the only one? And it would vary on the subject field wouldn't it? For example the more esoteric or specialized a subject area the lower the citation numbers one would expect to find.

Anyway, I appreciate your insights and thank you for taking the time to share them with me. I'm going to think on it and stay out of that discussion.

As far as presenting a subject's work and including criticisms of it without trying to debunk a person's views and work seems to be a rocky road when it comes to "fringe" subjects on Wikipedia. I can see both sides of the argument. I think at the very least that subject's views should be explained straightforwardly from his or her perspecitve first. Often things are picked out (cherrypicked) to make them look silly or text is larded up with pejoratives to smear people with unpopular views. Anyway, more to think about. Thanks again. Candleabracadabra (talk) 23:40, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

An example of my last point would be the use of the term denialist and denialism. I think it's fine to note that someone is viewed as a denialist if it's well sourced. But just saying someone "is" a denialist seems clearly wrong and biased. It passes a judgment and presents a subject in a way that's clearly non-neutral. Someone who believes in God may well think that atheists are denialist. I understand the word has a particular meaning and application, but my point is that just because someone has an unpopular view does not mean they are in denial. They may just believe in the minority view and evidence supporting it. Certainly there are semantic games used to win arguments. I don't think we should be a party to them although we can certainly present them. Was Galileo a denialist for being convinced that the sun was the center of the ppsolar system]]? His views were not popular at the time. Or at least that's the legend. I know there were others before him.. Anyway, have a nice eve. Candleabracadabra (talk) 23:50, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, this can be a narrow line to walk. Personally, I agree with what you say: I prefer to avoid characterizing people in single terms if the meaning or implication is negative. I think it's fairer just to state the facts of what they write or say, and leave it at that. There are usually nuances and qualifications involved. If the the term is widely used, the fairest thing is to use a quotation, and make clear the qualifications & bias of the person being quoted I would like to say, only quote from a neutral source, but for some topics there is no neutral source. DGG ( talk ) 03:26, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Topera Medical

Hello DGG,

I came across the Topera Medical page, and noticed you added a neutrality and news release flag to the page. I want to work on fixing the article and removing these flags -- could you fill me in as to what about the article prompted you to add them? That way I can know what to look for and remove. Thanks! Adamh4 (talk) 19:08, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

adjectives of quality and anecdotal accounts of the inventor's background are considered promotional. Don't write this as a narrative, but a descriptive article. Articles on medicine and medical claims are subject to sourcing requirements--see WP:MEDRES. Scientific presentations at meetings & newsletters are not peer-reviewed, and not RS for medical claims, nor are press releases saying a particular hospital has adopted it (I do however see some genuine references). I have not examined these references in detail, and I think I would have to do so to write a clear article. The numbers reported are not consistent: section 3.1 para 1 says 29% for the products single procedure success rate over an unspecified "long term"; para 2 of the section reports 82%. I suspect it is the article which is unclear. (but maybe it is that inconsistent--see Catheter ablation ). I note ref 22 which seems rather skeptical, but is reported as positive. It isn't clear if the firm is the only producer of a workstation for the procedure, or for the electrode. Most of this material belong in a separate article on the procedure, or integrated as a paragrapher into the main article on the technique.

I think a more expert opinion may help, so I ask Randykitty. DGG ( talk ) 00:42, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the direction, I'll definitely try and work on this page to clean it up. I can post any edits/proposals on the talk page before I make them, that way everyone can clearly see what kind of action I'm taking. Thanks for the help -- I appreciate it. Adamh4 (talk) 16:14, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Adamh4 (talk · contribs), If you want to write a complete replacement, which is what I would advise, it might be clearer if you do it as a user subpage. Let me know in either case when I should look again DGG ( talk ) 17:16, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

I've copied and pasted the original article into my sandbox, and am working on edits there -- if you'd like to look over them and let me know if I'm going in the right direction, I would appreciate it. Most of the edits will involve cutting unsourced information as well as promotional sentences; I'm anticipating the finished revision to end with a much shorter version. Adamh4 (talk) 18:36, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

I've made some progress on the sandbox. If you get the chance to read over my version of the page, we can figure out whether or not it's neutral enough to remove the flags. If not, I can continue to fix the page up until it does. Thanks again! Adamh4 (talk) 19:22, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

I worked on the page in my sandbox, and posted my edits into the article itself -- if it's good enough to remove the flags, let me know. If not, I'd like to hear what else I could do to help fix the page; thanks again. Adamh4 (talk) 16:04, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jews_and_Communism_(2nd_nomination)

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jews_and_Communism_(2nd_nomination). Thanks. MarkBernstein (talk) 21:59, 9 May 2014 (UTC)Template:Z48

the opposition to this and the other parallel "Jews in .." articles that were deleted is so opposite to everything I hold important in the world, including the idea of a NPOV encyclopedia, that I can only with difficulty participate in these discussions. I have elsewhere ascribed it to the desire to hide the significance of Jews in the world to avoid arousing the anti-Semites. It is not possible to logically argue against fear and irrationality. DGG ( talk ) 02:30, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Just a note

I don't think I did justice to your very acute wake-up comments at the AfD, particularly striking because, in the drift towards uniformity, you took a stand marked by complete independence of judgement. Deeply appreciated. When I read, particularly,

There is no reason why anyone--in particular any Jew --should find anything shameful about the association of Jews and Communism in Russia, except the inability to foresee the future.

I thought of Vasily Grossman's outstanding Life and Fate, which manages, other than the direct horror of the context, to write astonishing vignettes that embrace all the complexities of identities, Kalmuck/Tartar Jewish swept up in the Communist cause, with, among comrades, the various prejudices, ethnic/antisemitic, coming to the surface, only to be talked out. 2% of the officer class of the Soviet forces that effectively won WW2, despite our films and lore, were Jewish. The great vice of superficial eyes is to judge with the facile wisdom of hindsight while ignoring the hard and sometimes tragic options fronting real people in earlier generations (it's true, for me, also of 1948). After the trench warfare attritions and military command's quasi genocidal military tactics in WW1, choosing to be Communist was one of the few ostensibly rational or ethical options left, something events in Italy and Germany in the succeeding decade could only reinforce. Thanks, anyway, and sorry for this soapy intrusion.Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

You may appreciate in connection with the novel the edition of his wartime notebooks,A Writer at War : a Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. For another account of the appeal & disappointment of Communism, see the final volume of Victor Klemperer's diary, The Lesser Evil DGG ( talk ) 19:47, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Gravity R&D

A second opinion on Gravity R&D would be good (I'd deprodded it). Same problem as Wevorce? Or a different one? Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 20:27, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

same fundamental problem, with the additional questions of whether runner up for a prize is significant information, and whether a prize for "best startup" or any similar wording has any significance beyond "not yet notable." I have often brought up these two factors in dealing with an article on a firm that might appear to meet the GNG if looked at without considering what information is being reported by the source; they have sometimes been accepted as reasons for deletion. My AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wevorce is an attempt to open the general question of the applicability of the GNG to small companies. Soon after I came here I once made the naïve keep argument: "it meets the GNG. Why do we have the rule if we're not going to use it?" and the article whatever it was got kept. I've learned better since then; the question is whether WP has learned also. DGG ( talk ) 00:53, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. :) Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 05:57, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Gravity can be deleted under regular GNG rules, because all the sources are primary, including the awards (see my views on awards as primary sources here) Wevorce is clearly notable in my opinion. DGG, I think this is more in-line with your set of arguments. In this case the PR agency that wrote the Wikipedia page and secured the corresponding media coverage specializes in hiring journalists that write feature stories and shop them around to someone who will publish them as-is under their own byline. So it is impossible to confirm if the sources are truly independent as required by GNG, because there is legitimate reason to speculate that they are actually written by the PR agency, despite the byline. In this case, since there is actual evidence of this practice, my instinct is to delete all the corresponding articles as a matter of erring on the side of safety. CorporateM (Talk) 15:41, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Kanban

I came across the Kanban (development) afd shortly after posting to the COIN about Kanban Tool. From there I, too, noticed a huge number of related articles and a great number of SPAs working on them.

While Kanban and Kanban (development) seem notable to my unknowledgeable eye, Kanban board, CONWIP, SwiftKanban, Kanbanery, and Electronic kanban (for examples) seem much less so.

Tangential are CodeBeamer (previously [weakly, it seems] kept at afd), Trello, Rally Software, Avnet Abacus, PUFT, and Continuous-flow manufacturing. (I came across this bunch by looking at what few, if any, other articles the active SPAs worked on).

Anyway, don't know if you have any interest in following up on this; I'm just on my way out and read that you noticed there were a lot of these. There are a couple that are obvious deletes to me, and I'll probably tackle those later if you don't.

Thanks. --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  18:02, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

It's relatively simple to decide on the notability of individual products or companies., but much harder when dealing with general concepts. As one difference, products & companies are discrete subjects, but concepts usually flow into each other. As another, it does not take subject expertise to decide if a product has sufficient RS reviews, or a company sufficient non-PR-based sources; but it does take expertise to judge when two related subjects are distinct enough to need separate articles. That's my problem in dealing with the pair of articles Kanban / Kanban (development): as a non-expert, I do not see the difference--they look to me like two closely related applications of the same basic concept. If you understand the field any better than I--which seems very possible despite your comment about your own lack of knowledgeability---perhaps you can clarify more sharply the differences between the two-- or else find someone to do it. I'd be very glad to have someone knowledgable and with a NPOV do it. It would be especially nice to have an actual authoritative source for the distinction.

As for the others, I think the best tactic is to work first on the least likely among them, rather than simultaneously nominate a group of subjects with different degrees of possible notability. so I'm very glad to get your view on this. In nominating for deletion, sometimes prod is best to see if the articles will be defended, (and, in a case like this, who it is that might show up to defend them) so I sometimes try it first. On the other hand, AfD gives some degree of assistance against immediate re-creation. I will follow them up if necessary, but, frankly, I have so many other things to follow up that I would be very grateful if you'd do the nominations. DGG ( talk ) 21:33, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

The clarity of the article(s) are indeed problematic. Just starting off with the kanban article, it cites dictionary.com in the first sentence, then explicitly contradicts the dictionary.com definition in the very next sentence. NPOV/TONE issues seem pretty common starting off with an unsourced 'Kanban became an effective tool in support of running a production system as a whole, and it proved to be an excellent way for promoting improvement.' Ultimately I'm not actually of any use to you in explaining it, though, as I had never heard of it before stumbling upon Kanban Tool. I prodded Avnet Abacus and PUFT (but they were tangents) and see that you did the same for Kanbanery. I will say this: there are an awful lot of sources for kanban when I search for it, even with added search terms like "software development." I just don't see the need for articles for all the components and variations (e.g. Kanban board/Electronic kanban). It's pretty far outside my knowledge and interest areas, though. --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  03:41, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Possible vandalism

It seems that contributions of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Catladyface are suspicious. The user has created 4 pages in a span of 32 minutes, seems to be promoting organizations indirectly. Can you please check activities of this user. Itsalleasy (talk) 02:58, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

I have already given the editor some advice. I think they're likely to be an enthusiastic librarian or library school student, who can be a real asset here once they learn what's expected (the material seems to have the flavour of library school term papers, and I should know, having taught in one for several years) DGG ( talk ) 07:15, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Jeroen van den Hoven

Dear DGG: Here's a submission about a professor. Here's the Google Scholar report: http://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=cC3UUzMAAAAJ&hl=en . Should this one be kept? —Anne Delong (talk) 01:27, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

editor of major journal, which is sufficient. Not obvious, because they didn't know to italicize it. I've accepted. GS doesn't help much in fields like this. DGG ( talk ) 01:52, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! —Anne Delong (talk) 01:59, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Devaka Fernando

Thank you for your comments about the style of this page. It is the first page I wrote on wikipedia and English is not my first language. I would appreciate some assistance about how I can respond to your comments. The subject has emigrated from Sri Lanka and the page was intended to record his services to Sri Lanka and information was taken from newspapers and medical journals etc. Thank you for your assistance. Fattutor (talk) 02:00, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Having looked at the page again I see why it seems like a news release. your comment was very helpful. I have done some editing and would like some feedback if you have time to do so. Hope you find it sufficient to justify removing the tags. The high school stuff is pretty important in Sri Lanka ( in the country sometimes more than the academic notability!!!!)

I would be grateful if you could give some feedback on some of the other pages I created. Fattutor (talk) 03:07, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

I would also like your view on where the balance between 'name dropping' and linking to other wikipages should be drawn? Fattutor (talk) 04:59, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

I'll get there tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 05:14, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Fattutor,sorry for the delay. As I think I said before, the details of his high school career are irrelevant, and probably the details of his college career also. That some of his teachers or coaches or coworkers are notable does not by itself justify naming them, especially if they are not related to the major part of his notability. We only list the top 3 or 4 papers, as judging by citations. DGG ( talk ) 06:13, 24 May 2014 (UTC) .

Thats most helpful. I take your point about colleagues and relevance to notability in terms of an encyclopaedia as opposed to a news paper article. I guess thats what lists and categories should do without clogging up the main page. I have written pages on several such academics and logically your advice requires that similar changes need to be made in all of them. I will try try the Sri Lanka group for further advice.

Looking through the article and supporting references as well as the linked in profile closely again it appears that the university posts are honorary and he's a clinical doctor. I appear to be wrtiting about someone who is not an academic in the Anglo-American sense by being a full time Faculty member but a professional with an academic affiliation to Faculties of Medicine, Health care management, Health informatics and Health policy etc Should I list the most cited paper in each area to a maximum of 4 or 4 in each? The links to researchgate and googlescholar give the full list anyway so listing too many is probably unnecessary.

Thank you for giving up time to give advice and guidance as I have found reading your Talk page very useful. Fattutor (talk) 08:17, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

James T. Butts, Jr.

My concerns that using op-eds and primary sources for contentious material about a BLP seem unpopular on this page so far. I have pinged BLPN, but my experience has been that posting on any noticeboard tends to go archived without discussion unless there is a contentious argument that attracts more attention. Maybe you can advise if I am really so crazy to think that the article is out-of-step. CorporateM (Talk) 15:32, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

it's wildly disproportionate, but some of these do seem to be newspaper articles. Try adding some more material, such as his basic biography, DGG ( talk ) 04:04, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

FYI - I have shared this draft on the Talk page. I wasn't really planning on actually writing the article, but I'll see if that moves things forward. Editors seem to be focusing on the few sources that are reliable and therefore unwilling to remove those that are not. CorporateM (Talk) 03:56, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Merger proposal

DGG, since you recently participated in the deletion discussion for NOS Marine Forensics Program, you might be interested in the merger proposal. RockMagnetist (talk) 15:57, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Talk:Academic Questions

Hi David, could you perhaps have a look here and see whether you can solve their problem? --Randykitty (talk) 10:12, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

I've done that DGG ( talk ) 20:10, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

William B. Helmreich

I think this scholar at CUNY (also known as William Helmreich) is notable, and should have an article. What do you think? Bearian (talk) 16:58, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

apparently yes,based on his books; was a draft started somewhere? If the page was deleted, I can't find it. DGG ( talk ) 19:43, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

I'll start a draft this month in my sandbox. Bearian (talk) 16:11, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Pur (brand)

I rarely disagree with you, but here is one. I deprodded the article. Bearian (talk) 19:37, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

I'll recheck it , to see if I want to take it to AfD . DGG ( talk ) 19:43, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

That's fair. Bearian (talk) 16:10, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Burghardt Wittig

A professor for you. —Anne Delong (talk) 02:18, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

right. on my list. DGG ( talk ) 05:04, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

And another: Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Clionadh Raleigh - no refs, though... —Anne Delong (talk) 12:07, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

A third. Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Ernest A. Hakanen. Do you want me to keep sending you these? There may be an unending supply... —Anne Delong (talk) 13:20, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Anne Delong, yes, if I haven;t already commented, to make sure I don't miss any. As you say, it's a long list, but some will be acceptable as is. DGG ( talk ) 05:35, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

MonaVie

Hello DGG. I have previously worked on edits for MonaVie and it has been on my watch list. I was thinking of a possible proposed edit, but wanted to run it by you to see what you think.

In the lede, it is mentioned in the first sentence that the company is multi-level marketing. The last two clauses of the lede state "its business plan resembles a pyramid scheme, and few of its distributors make a profit." I was under the impression that a pyramid scheme by definition meant that few distributors make a profit, so feel as though those two clauses are redundant, and one should be taken out. Do you agree? If not, could you explain why? Thank you Adamh4 (talk) 15:08, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

I can think of ways to combine the two sentence, but the emphasis is needed DGG ( talk ) 05:30, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

That makes sense. What do you think of changing the sentence to "and few of its distributors make a profit, resulting in the business resembling a pyramid scheme"? Adamh4 (talk) 15:10, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/School-based family counseling

I've invoked WP:TNT at least once a month in the past year, but this is far from the worst I've seen. Bearian (talk) 16:26, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Carbone Smolan Agency

Hello DGG. Finally, I have had the opportunity to return to my draft of Carbone Smolan Agency and edit and improve it. Thank you for placing it in the IMPROVEMENT section so I could do so without reentering all the footnotes. When the story was pulled in February some of the comments/critiques were that it used too many footnote references and "dropped" too many names.

I was also advised to remove some of the superfluous quotes from the principals of the firm and, in general, watch that I do not get too promotional. As I wrote earlier, I am a design journalist and write for a number of magazines including Communication Arts, a 55 year old publication based in Menlo Park, CA. I know these people but will not take compensation from them for doing this feature profile. I am ready to get back into the scrum and work with you and any editor to help me get this article suitable for publication on Wiki. I believe I have answered most of the concerns but I suspect more will be raised and I welcome them.

When you have time, would you review and give me your toughest critique. Please note: many of the references in the feature article are from design industry publications and from the American Institute of Graphic Design, the guild that guides our business. To those unfamiliar with those publications, they might seem obscure but all are well respected in the business of design and advertising. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration. Porterwritewiki (talk) 21:19, 28 May 2014 (UTC)porterwritewikiPorterwritewiki (talk) 21:19, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

In a few days. DGG ( talk ) 05:33, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Help with something?

Hey DGG- I was wondering if you could help give your input in something I'm trying to propose. Basically what I'm trying to do is add something to WP:NOT about articles claiming their topic to be the first of their kind, a pioneer in a specific field, or so on without any coverage to show that this accomplishment is automatically notable. Some of the arguments I've made in the proposed section come across a little vague and I've done a little TL;DNR in the comments section trying to explain what I'm trying to get across: basically that we've had a lot of people whittle down genres and accomplishments to where it's easy to claim that they're first but not show anything to verify that it's notable or even really true. It's at Wikipedia_talk:Arguments_to_avoid_in_deletion_discussions#Another_argument_to_add.3F, if you're interested. You're fairly concise in your arguments so if you could find a better way to phrase this and make it clearer, I'd be all for it. I know it could sound contradictory to some things in places such as WP:AUTHOR, but mostly it's just that I'd like something to point people towards when they say that someone should be kept without having the coverage to prove their claims about being a rare example or pioneer in their field. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 15:09, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

it is a matter of judgment in any particular case, and judgment around here is spectacularly inconsistent. I'm particularly concerned about the articles relying on first of a particular nationality or in a particular locality to do something. Perhaps the best approach to this is the one you suggest: it can be a very difficult thing to prove, and even ordinarily "reliable" sources like newspapers are not very reliable about this. I'll comment. (But where there is no source at all, it's easy: WP:V prevents us from including the claim at all.) DGG ( talk ) 01:39, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

demonstrating Keith Dowman's notability

You wrote the following about the submitted article on Keith Dowman:

Comment: Actually, the listing of multiple works published by the subject is a reasonable indication that the subject might be notable. What is needed to establish it is evidence that the works are regarded as important. The key criterion applicable here is WP:AUTHOR DGG ( talk ) 18:17, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

... which is great. Mr. Dowman is cited and footnoted constantly. For example, i just checked five random books on Tibetan Buddhism and all of them either/or both listed Dowman in their bibliography or footnoted him. Wikipedia itself cites Mr. Dowman over a 100 times. i don't know what to add to the article that isn't contrived to demonstrate that he is frequently cited and therefore notable. Please help? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drugpa kunley (talk • contribs) 08:30, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, but, Drugpa kunley, the way we do it is by references to published reviews of the book or to specific published statements about the importance of the book by recognized authorities. The article must stand on its own. DGG ( talk ) 15:22, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Okay, so for example, Natural Perfection: Longchengpa's Radical Dzogchen contains a glowing foreword by Namkhai Norbu, who is, as a retired well-published professor of Tibetology and as a 'master' recognized by Tibetan Buddhists authorities, one of the greatest living authorities on Dzogchen and Tibetan Buddhism in general. Wouldn't that by itself be enough? Or wouldn't the fact that Mr. Dowman has collaborated with Tarthang Tulku, also a highly regarded Tibetan Buddhist teacher (to name a couple) also be enough? Or the fact that he gives seminars with Claudio Naranjo, which i did not mention in the article because it didn't seem germane to a descriptive article on Mr. Dowman? The nature of writings scholarly books within spiritual disciplines with the specific aim of addressing practice rather than academic understanding is that, by definition, they don't tend to be reviewed by academics. Other than writing prefaces and forewords, notables like Namkhai Norbu, Tarthang Tulku or Claudio Naranjo do not tend to write book reviews or publish statements about the importance of books.

The first one is usable; if you have an exact reference, quote and pages. It's not definitive, because people tend to say nice things about their friends in forwards. The other two are helpful, but don't actually add much. "Collaborated with" can be true for a very junior colleague. I jointly published with my doctoral advisor, but that does not make me notable.

On a broader matter, the difficulty in getting suitable sourcing for people in many spiritual traditions is a very real one, and I think we do tend to be very flexible in such cases. Add what you can, and I will look at it. DGG ( talk ) 19:50, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

i have added what i could. Thank you so much for your help. Here is the link to the page...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Keith_Dowman Should i go ahead and resubmit the page, or can you check it first?

−

There's one more thing. It's our rule that every statement in the article must have a source. For the basic facts of his life, it can be his own website, but for the key aspects of notability, it should ideally be a third party source written by someone else. Some of this will not be possible in this case, but some of it is. Try to do as much as possible. If nothing is referenced , someone is fairly certain to object to the article. Then let me know, but it will be Monday until I can get to it DGG ( talk ) 01:39, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Pius Cheung

"who called it" what? You left a sentence unfinished at [7]

cleaned. I'll need to fill it in later. DGG ( talk ) 19:36, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Also, would you consider archiving some of the old but un-archived material above? – Fayenatic London 18:16, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

it was much worse, but it will get a little shorter. DGG ( talk ) 19:36, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Questionable notability page for WikiProject:Women Artists

Hi! Here you go Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_artists/Notability_concerns. SarahStierch (talk) 19:21, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Hey!

Hi, David,
It was a pleasure to meet you, face-to-face, and hear your presentation. Are your slides posted on the Wikiconference page? I'm really interested in the stats you shared about the state of AfC in 2007 vs. 2013. I think it's so important to be aware of the changes occurring on Wikipedia as it evolves over time in order to gain an accurate long-term view of where things are headed. Thanks again! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:03, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

RE: Wink

Hi, I've added more information about the request deletion at Talk:Wink_Technologies. I believe it will address your concerns. Namely, the references that seemed to indicate notability do not support the content in the article. What prompted the deletion request was the reference in the "Significance" section - it does not even mention Wink. As I removed the reference and started to rework the section, I realized there wasn't a good replacement to demonstrate any significance at all.

I'd be happy to just fix the problems and update the article as I had originally planned. I just didn't want to go through the effort only for somebody to say "Hey, that doesn't look very notable anymore!" Please let me know how to proceed. Thanks, Wieldthespade (talk) 23:34, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Your input at the Michael Wines section of WP:BLPN would be appreciated. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:15, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Michael J. Kuhar

Hi, I had been communicating with the subject of this article on OTRS before you accepted it and moved it from AFC to Michael J. Kuhar. He just wrote to me expressing surprise that the article is now in main space.

I was wondering, on what basis did you accept this? It's basically an unsourced bio article. Every single source listed is something the subject himself published. The article lists zero independent coverage by reliable sources as required by WP:BLP. Therefore, it seemed quite unready for publication in main article space.

I'm curious about your rationale, and also whether you agree it might be a good idea to move back to AFC. ~Amatulić (talk) 14:44, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

• Seems to easily pass WP:PROF. I've fixed a couple typos, added a couple facts and sources. It needs work, but I don't think notability is at issue here. BLP does require facts are verifiable, and that contentious facts are verified, but anything contentious without a cite can just be removed. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 15:39, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

• "Candler Professor of Neuropharmacology" passes WP:PROF, and all that is necessary is for it to be proven,and the university web site is enough to prove it.I accepted it on that basis, assuming, correctly , that the rest of the sourcing could easily be added from the sources given. They're apparently uncontroversial plain facts, and the sources are good enough for plain facts even in a BLP. Further, I see no reason why the subject might want this removed, and he is in fact so distinguished that I would not apply the optional clause of BLP. One possible factor might be the desire of those working at a center doing the research he does to mask their identity, and I accordingly edited the lede slightly. The family sentence is uncited, and tho it will probably be in a who's who or other directory, which is good enough for that detail, it's personal so I removed it. The awards are surely in his cv, a sufficient source, which is probably on line and needs to be found, but is trivial. I also did some copy editing--the writing was a little promotional. Parts of his career are very public, and if he wanted to obscure his identity he wouldn't do that. (But if there is some other factor I do not understand, please communicate with me off wiki--I'm also an OTRS volunteer. DGG ( talk ) 16:09, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

The AfD discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/RedHack

I know you have taken an interest in the activities of User:Mr. Guye. I have tried to make meaningful contact several times with this user. But he just gets more experience using tools without developing judgment. Could you take a look at RedHack, the AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/RedHack, and the response to a plea from the article creator at User Talk:Mr. Guye? I know this is a strange article, but... - Neonorange (talk) 02:52, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

I commented at the AfD . DGG ( talk ) 23:41, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/E. Arumugam

One more professor. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:09, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

this particular individual would not I think meet WP:PROF, so there's no point keeping it around. He seems to be a routine university teacher. I listed for G13. DGG ( talk ) 05:01, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

SightLife

While I agree that awards for "best companies to work for" are not the type of thing that I would normally think about putting in a Wikipedia article, having that kind of baggage doesn't make an article's topic non-notable. Given that a reliable independent source lists SightLife as becoming the leading US eye-bank in 2009, you might want to reconsider Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/SightLife. --Bejnar (talk) 23:52, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

of course it implies nothing about notability one way or another; it does however imply something about promotionalism. Incidentally, what has been the status since 2009? DGG ( talk ) 01:15, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

I don't know, a four page case study by an independent researcher, a lawyer, published by a reliable publisher (Wiley) should add some weight to significant coverage. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the research, Norton focused on the global aspects of SightLife and not on the US market for their traditional services, so I don't know what has happened since in the US. But according to Non-Profit Times their number of employees went from 80 in 2012, to 92 in 2013, to 107 in 2014. So they seem to be growing. --Bejnar (talk) 03:12, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Oren Laurent

Tried to request for undeletion but that was the wrong page. Could you undelete (and protect if necessary) solely for the purpose of redirecting to the subject's company, Banc De Binary, and of having the article and talk history available? I know this would be a controversial request if I were someone badly behaved, but I'm trying to keep up with all the rules. I emailed BDB and got a reply back and so have been describing myself as "possible COI" but I don't know that that helps any given the history described by Tokyo girl 79 about this request. I don't know that DRV would overturn a result simply for redirect and history. Okteriel (talk) 06:21, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

If not, please say no, so I can decide where to turn. I suspect the article and talk histories will have data useful to improving the BDB article, as Black Kite has asked us. Okteriel (talk) 18:12, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation#AFC Backlog Drive

Hey DGG, since you gave that talk at WikiConference USA, I think my recent post to the WPAfC talk page is relevant to you. I offer some concerns about how reviews are being done and whether the processes we've instituted are really doing the work we want them to do. Blurpeace 19:31, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

I did comment, tho perhaps I may have been a little over-enthusiastic. DGG ( talk ) 03:43, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Links to archives

Hallo David, the editor with the poorly-chosen username KCL Archives (talk · contribs) added a lot of links to collections of the papers of subjects of articles - the first example I found on my watchlist was Bowlby. Dormskirk (talk · contribs) has reverted all of these, with edit summaries "Please do not add links to your own organization (see WP:ELNO)" and "‎ (per WP:LINKSPAM)".

Two complications:

• after the poor choice of username was pointed out, it looks as if the same editor has been editing as IP 137.73.18.77 (talk · contribs)
• and their boiler-plate text for additions says "The paper of ..." rather than "The papers of ...", even in a case where it's 158 boxes of papers (example.

My reading of WP:CURATOR and Wikipedia:Advice_for_the_cultural_sector is that archivists etc are positively encouraged to improve the encyclopedia by providing External Links to their resources where "the link gives readers critical information uniquely relevant to the topic": a major repository of a subject's papers seems to me to fit this description.

What do you think? PamD 23:23, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

The usual practice is that we permit and encourage this if the collection is the main collection of papers about the subject, but not if it is only incidental holdings. This means each instance needs to be evaluated separately,and it also means that boilerplate additions are not generally a good idea. I would recommend that new editors doing this make the suggestion on the talk pages of the articles, but I think editors who have done enough work here to be trustworthy could do it directly, and that would include official Wikipedians in Residence.

They should go in the EL section only if there is a full online summary or at least description to link to--otherwise the better practice is to add them to a separate section, such as Archival sources. It does help our readers to know where the principal archival records are. If used to document a specific point--and the published summary is sufficiently full to actually document it--they could go as references. Pam, can you check them or do you want some help? I'm a little busy, as the G13 notices will indicate.

Incidentally, it seems almost impossible to explain to people why our username policy prohibits corporate names, and I have come to think we would do much better to accept the French and German WP policies of permitting them, after due authorization thru OTRS. For now, I'd advise the ip to consider something like "John at KCL archives" , which we consider acceptable. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Wise words, all to be agreed with, and I have myself occasionally added links to interesting archives. In this case, where dozens of similar links to the one archive were added in a short time, it is hard to imagine that each one was given the careful consideration required. Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:26, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

yes indeed. But sometimes it happens that they were done justifiably, since the new editor does not realise that doing so is extremely imprudent. Still, we need to check each of them, because it is still possible they might all be relevant. . DGG ( talk ) 08:49, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

A justification for making an honest mistake, I see. But despite that, I think the observations we have made are correct. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:26, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

The links are to specific collections of papers within the archive, not just a general link to the archive. But they are badly formulated - typo of "paper" for "papers", and no link to the collection itself at Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. I would like to offer the enthusiastic editor (most recently editing as 137.73.18.77 (talk · contribs)) some advice so that they can enhance the encyclopedia by adding appropriate links. One I've looked at was 158 boxes, but another couple seem to be only a couple of documents, so not all the links seem worthwhile.

Is there advice anywhere general on linking to archives like this? If not, could I ask which would seem to be better, taking John Winthrop Hackett as an example:

(a) The text sentence "Hackett's papers are in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, London." (with a ref to the description at http://www.kingscollections.org/catalogues/lhcma/collection/h/ha05-001) (a1) in the "Legacy" section, or (a2) in a new "Archival sources" section

or

(b) "Hackett's papers in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, London." as a bullet point (b1) in new section "Archival sources", or (b2) in "External links"? PamD 13:49, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Possibly of interest

If I remember rightly, you're at the Lincoln Center library? Would you be interested in helping us get an article on Benjamin Steinberg? He has an NYT obit (which I cannot read in full right now; I'm hoping they will let me see it in July) and a short AP obit, and according to his daughter there is oodles of material at Lincoln Center. See User talk:Yngvadottir/Archive 6#My father, Benjamin Steinberg; Xanthomelanoussprog and I gave her some help with Symphony of the New World and that led me to the conviction that we need an article on him. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:17, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Ill get to it , but it may be a week or so. DGG ( talk ) 18:21, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

It can definitely wait that long :-) She mentions her intention to be at the library during a week in July. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:23, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

) 

Want to collaborate on an essay for Wikipedia space?

Spotted your remark that it took about 6 months to learn to edit here, and was inspired to start an essay, Getting through the beginning stages of editing .... Want to collaborate on making it into an essay for Wikipedia space? Djembayz (talk) 10:42, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

I'll take a look--- of course, i meant it takes 6 months to learn most of the aspects of not just editing, but of working here in general, including effectiveness in discussions. DGG ( talk ) 23:09, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Jubilee USA page deletion - Referred by User Hoary

Hi- I'm trying to re-establish the Jubilee USA Network wiki page which was deleted earlier this year. It's a legitimate organization currently getting a ton of news coverage. I wrote a few paragraphs here to get it started, but as I'm pretty new to Wikipedia, I don't know if I'm doing it right. The user Hoary told me to place show this to you as you were somebody who authorized the deletion. I really appreciate your time and help!

Here's what I've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AndrewHanauer/Jubilee_USA

Thanks!AndrewHanauer (talk) 01:14, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi- Checking back in. Was the draft I wrote ok? Does it need work? If so, what? It is just a small segment, but I feel it is unbiased and accurate and only cites the org's website for things like internal structure and mission statement. After it gets up, I'm happy to keep working on it more. Thanks!AndrewHanauer (talk) 13:11, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

How's this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AndrewHanauer/Jubilee_USA AndrewHanauer (talk) 14:35, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Simin Meydani

Hi, DGG. I came across this professor. Maybe you'd like to check it out. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:39, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

notable. h = 60 at least, many articles with over 100 citations.--as you know, I do not use h by itself as a discriminating factor, but when field is taken into account, it does serve as a rough screen. The reviewer has been consistently declining articles on academics as non-notable without checking the citations to their work, which is of course the primary and usual basis for notability under WP:PROF, . But there are problems, which prevent immediate acceptance. . The major one is that some of it is is a copypaste from their web site, and the rest reads as if it were, so it will need rewriting.

"Senior scientist" is sometimes an ambiguous title, but in a good university, it often represents the equivalent to full professor, so it always indicates the need to check. (& she is that also).

However, it is already in WP , under a different form of the name Simin Nikbin Meydani. Unfortunately, it contains the same faults, including the copypaste mentioned above. I've taken care of it. My experience is that it almost always pays to check with a search inside WP before doing work on an article. The frequent and very understandable response to bad reviewing is to just rewrite it directly into mainspace ; unfortunately, people sometimes do just the same after rejection by good reviewing. When I started working on afcs, I checked every plausible submission good or bad just in case an article was in mainspace, but I stopped for lack of time. It should really be built into the system as an obligatory first step. The problem is that one cannot count on an exact match, so it's going to be very tricky to do it with an algorithm that would find all cases. People do better for situations where there is possible ambiguity, but where are the people to do the work? DGG ( talk ) 17:57, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Sloane Citron

You had restored this AfC after it was deleted under G13. HasteurBot tagged it again since it has been six months since you restored it. Did you still want to check on this one? -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 04:56, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. The wat I do these, when a first review a 6 month old article,

a) in the few times it is good enough for mainspace as is, I just accept it, usually doing a little touch-up for WP style. (my standard here is 70% odds of passing afd, a little higher than may reviewers) )
b) in the few times it just needs minor changes, I make them and accept it.
c) in the 20% or so of times it seems likely to be notable with major improvements, i postpone it.
d) In the majority of times it does not seem at all likely, I let it get deleted if nobody else decides to rescue it
e) Int a considerable number of times it merits speedy deletion as promotional, copyvio, or so on I list it for deletion.
but unless I think it obvious that there must be an existing article I have not usually been checking for that, though I ought to. If I did, another significant number could be deleted as duplicates--with perhaps 1/4 of them justifying deletion of the mainspace article also.

When the 20% postponed drafts come up again, along with those other people postponed, I {like others) adopt a stricter standard to avoid too many repeated postponements:
a) if there is any reasonable chance a minor fix will make it 50 or % likely to pass afd I pass it. When it's that borderline, the community should have a chance to decide.
b) if it looks fixable but not worth fixing, I let it get deleted
c) Otherwise I either postpone it again or make some partial improvement so it will at least look better.
but, again, if I decide to fix & accept, it often turns out that the article was already in mainspace,where it may or may not need deletion or major improvement.

That in fact was the case here. I decided to fix it adequately, only to find that while the reference format had been fixed, the article was even more overwritten and promotional than the draft. I've tagged it accordingly, and am considering whether to work on it.

The only real way to properly deal with drafts that need improvement is to notify the relevant Wikiprojects and workgroups. It would be trivial to notify not just these postponed drafts but all incoming drafts--the mechanism exists for newpages, called WP:Deletion sorting --but the people programming afc have for unspecified reasons not adopted it. DGG ( talk ) 19:55, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Michael Hanna

The problem as I saw it is that the article was essentially a prosified version of a résumé, which as written (a) didn't even make any substantive claim that its subject actually passes any of our notability rules (which as you know require more than mere confirmation of existence), (b) was completely unreferenced, and (c) to all appearances the article subject created it himself, and then detagged it himself when another editor quite correctly tagged it for {{autobiography}} and {{notability}}. I'd be happy to sandbox it if someone can demonstrate that viable references actually exist with which it can actually be turned into a real encyclopedia article instead of a misplaced LinkedIn profile, but actually salvaging it as a keepable article is going to require a lot more than merely toning down one or two slightly promotional sentences. Bearcat (talk) 13:23, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Bearcat, any of these are reasons for deletion; none of them are reasons for speedy--please undelete. Speedy does not require proof or likelihood of notability, just indication of some significance, and head of UCL's neurology unit is an indication of importance. Unsourced has been specifically stated many times as an insufficient reason for speedy deletion; Autobiography similarly is not reason for speedy. Being based on a linkedin profile is not reason for speedy . Unsatisfactory does not equal speedy, only unsatisfactory because of the reasons at WP:CSD. If you want to use afd after I've cleaned it, use afd. DGG ( talk ) 22:25, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

As written, the article entirely correctly qualified for speedy under both G11 (unambiguous advertising or promotion) and A7 (article which did not make a substantive claim of notability), and I am not changing my mind on either of those points. You're correct that COI/AUTOBIO are not in and of themselves reasons for deletion in isolation, but those aren't the reasons I pulled the trigger — I did so because the article's basic writing tone was not encyclopedic in the first place, and because the article lacked even the slightest hint of sourcing to support even the slightest hint of a notability claim that actually passed one of our basic inclusion rules. And if the COI/AUTOBIO problems are true of an article which also meets one or more of the criteria that are reasons for speedy deletion, then they do constitute extra confirmation that the intent of the article was fundamentally advertorial rather than encyclopedic. They're not the reasons for deletion, but they do constitute corollary evidence in favour of the criteria that were the actual and stated reasons for deletion. As I said, I'm perfectly willing to sandbox it, but I am not willing to simply restore it to articlespace wholesale in its current state. Bearcat (talk) 22:47, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Bearcat, This is the first time in 7 yrs I've asked a fellow admit to revert a speedy, and been refused, tho certainly some have restored, and then gone to AfD for a community opinion. (I do want to make clear that I am not arguing it's a viable article at present, but just that it isn't a speedy.) I'm so surprised that I've looked further, and it seems that you have been frequently going by your own interpretation of "corollary evidence" instead of the actually deletion policy. Before I decide how to follow this up, I want to give you a chance to look at the other examples on your talk page. DGG ( talk ) 04:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Firstly, I did restore the article to draft space so that it can be worked on, so I'd thank you to avoid the assertion that I've refused to cooperate. But the article, as written, is a prosified version of a résumé which would require a fundamental rewrite to become properly encyclopedic in nature.

And I'm completely comfortable that nearly all of the deletions you singled out on my talk page were completely consistent with CSD as written. Asserting a topic's existence is not the same thing as asserting its significance — if it were, nothing would ever qualify for A7 at all — and all of the articles in question asserted existence but failed to assert significance, and/or were promotional in nature.

For starters, Cousin Matty did not assert (or source) its subject to be a "significant performer", but rather simply asserted his existence as a radio host on a single local radio station and then immediately devolved into a morass of unverifiable POV descriptions of his program ("fun", "energetic", "zany", etc.) which did constitute "advertising/promotion" — and nothing in the article actually constituted any substantive assertion of significance at all.

Similarly, I'm struggling with your certainty that Dollar Business is published by a "major" publisher — the company didn't have a Wikipedia article by which I could verify how "major" or "minor" it was, so I searched on Google and learned that the company was founded only one year ago and The Dollar Business is its only holding in any form of media. That doesn't make it a "major" publisher, but a small startup — which left me with only "this magazine exists" as a notability claim. And Uniiverse, too, completely failed to make any substantive assertion of significance — it documented the company's existence, certainly, but nothing in it rose to the level of asserting significance at all.

Like Hanna, Chattarji was a prosified version of a résumé, not an encyclopedic article about him; Stritesky was a literal résumé; and Carvalho was barely more than a résumé section — and the posting of résumés does fall under advertising/promotion. I most likely would have let all of them go if they'd been formatted differently than they were, but all of them had clearly promotional objectives that fully met the standard of requiring a fundamental complete-from-the-ground-up rewrite to become even remotely appropriate for inclusion in an encyclopedia.

I will grant that I deleted the school under the wrong criterion — I apologize for overlooking the fact that A7 excludes schools, but in reality it was actually still speediable: because it failed to make any mention whatsoever of where the school is located or what school board runs it, and absolutely nothing at all linked to the title, I had absolutely no way to identify where it could be redirected to. And for all of those reasons, it still qualified for speedy under A1 (insufficient context to identify the subject). If you feel strongly enough about it, I'd happily restore it just to redelete it A1 instead of A7, but it was fully speediable as written.

I mean, you're certainly free to disagree with me about whether something should be speediable or not — we're not all going to agree about anything on here, I know that. But the fact that you have a different opinion doesn't inherently mean that my reading was objectively wrong — I still don't see how any of the articles you singled out made substantive enough assertions of significance, as opposed to mere existence, to have made them nonspeediable. Bearcat (talk) 23:30, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

{U|Bearcat}}, I appreciate the detailed answer; please have the patience to read my reply--this is a disagreement, not a quarrel. I want to wait until tomorrow to look at them all again before re-examining details, and perhaps you are right that there is no point in analyzing them further between us. I am personally not concerned in the least about any of the articles, actually--they are just examples. .I was initially mainly concerned that you seem to be using a different standard that I think is outside the range that admins use here, but of course there is a straightforward way of settling this, which is DelRev. To some extent, each of us obviously using a somewhat different standard--despite attempts at precision, the CSD standards have a considerable element of judgment, and in any case I doubt any of us has a less than 5% error rate.

I have become somewhat more concerned that you do not take the customary measure that decrease the effective error rate: not to delete single-handed except on vandalism and the like (and for some technical deletions); assuming the nominator, not being an admin, has a 10% error rate, it decreases the errors to 0.5%, and I think it's futile for any WP process to aim at better.

I have become much more concerned now that I have realized you do not inform contributors before or even after. (again, this doesn't apply to vandals necessarily, or people making bad jokes, but I think it does have to apply to everyone else) Maintaining good relations and encouraging even initially unsatisfactory new contributors is the single most critical factor under our control to preserve WP. Very few people whose article is rejected ever tries here again (except of course the determined trouble-makers)--few even complain about the rejection, which at least gives us a second chance, they just go away , but most of them could be kept if we dealt with them better--and the first step in dealing with them better is to talk to them. What would anyone think of a person or organization that throws away your applications or submissions without even acknowledging or telling you?

Way back, my motive in becoming an admin was to deal with incorrect deletions, and I said so at the time. I've mostly been doing deletions myself unfortunately, DGG

Self/vanity publishing

David, could you perhaps have a look at this? Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 14:40, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

I commented, and will follow it up. DGG (at NYPL) -- reply here 19:20, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Other COI edits

I am working on responding to each of the pages. For here I wanted to research what you said about features only in promotional articles. All three other articles I've found in the industry have the same feature! I could use your advice on what I should do, if I have a potential COI in the industry. It's important to me that similar industry articles be handled similarly, but I don't want to make that too important.

• this edit does not show direct evidence of COI, although User:Shiply was created 2008 and active 2011.
• yes, this edit shows evidence of COI, and User:Tompey should be blanked.
• this edit shows mixed evidence; but earlier I searched requested articles and didn't find the alleged page referred to ("Creation of the uship page as requested in 'requested articles/internet'"), so that's significant.

Perhaps I should be more jaded and say that you're right, such statements themselves are evidence of a promotional article no matter what? Founding stories are automatically unencyclopedic unless the company is big, maybe. Can you please give Anyvan, Goldgenie, Shiply, User:Tompey, and UShip the same scrutiny you gave the articles I wrote for, as I did not want to take any edged weapons to them myself for obvious reasons? Frieda Beamy (talk) 16:40, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

You will probably find at least 100,000 promotional articles in WP , or 2% of the total. They exist for two basic reasons: First, our standards in our early years were much lower, and not all of the poor quality work done then has been revisited; in particular, a change occurred over the period 2010-2013 in large part as a response to the great increase in paid editing once our growing importance had become generally recognized. Second, many problems have simply been not noticed even for current articles there's about a 5% error rate in screening submissions here, in both directions (it used to be worse--when I came here in 2007 it was at least double. It ought to be lower, but given the wide community of people who participate, it may never get much better. After all, everyone has a non-zero error rate. My own is about 1% that I know of, so it's probably 2%. Some people do better, either because they work only on cut-and-dried decisions or in a limited field where standards are very solid--or because they're geniuses at what they do.

there's also a frequent situation, where an otherwise good article may have one bad section, and people have passed over the problem with the bad section, in order to concentrate more on removing the weaker articles. Sometimes such a section is added afterwards, and unlike new articles, we have no good method for reviewing such edits, It has sometimes happened that a promotional editor, after failing to get their promotion in the initial article, has managed to insert it afterwards; we remove such material when we notice it, but we do not always notice it. We tend to concentrate on detecting and removing downright vandalism in edits, not the insertion of subtle bias. And, inevitably ,we pay more attention to the most important articles; it is perhaps the most noticed weakness of WP that manipulation of the less important ones cannot easily be prevented.

Sometimes :origin stories have actual evidence; sometimes they are of such importance that they pass into legend, regardless of their accuracy (a traditional example is the myth of Newton's apple)--so they can sometimes be appropriate.

I noticed the other articles on firms in the industry, & intend to work on them. (I normally do check for related articles on the same subject or by the same editor) The similarity is indeed striking, considering they are all competitors. There were some you mentioned I had not noticed, and I will work on them. DGG ( talk ) 21:15, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, honestly. Here's just another thing, and don't feel a need to work on the following: I looked again at [8], and I find that this source is used about 130 times in mainspace, but it also features in about 60 deletion and spam discussions, and there's only one really useful link after wading through that. I judged this SEO aggregator site as unreliable twice now but who can argue with 130 other editors? Such is the tragicomedy of our situation. Frieda Beamy (talk) 03:18, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

This one is worth following up. it probably is also appropriate for putting on our blacklist. You've just shown one reason why we rely on new people joining; they will see things others have been missing. DGG ( talk ) 05:31, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

POV Mess

Hi DGG. At your convenience could you take a look at Persecution of traditional African religion. I think there is a strong argument for notability, but the wording of this article strikes me as terribly essayish/agenda oriented. I am seriously considering sending it to AfD but would like a second opinion before taking any action. Thanks... -Ad Orientem (talk) 21:46, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

It's of very low quality, but aside from the title (I might word it as "Interaction" not "Persecution", but that could be regarded as euphemism) I don't think that POV is the main problem, nor even the essay nature, but rather the superficial use of sources and the drawing of rather doubtful conclusion (perhaps Islam is more compatible than Christianity with African traditional religions, but it needs fuller evidence.) And the listing of 3 or 4 specific conflicts at the end greatly underplays the problem--that part is a good example of the way many WP articles are written by the addition or accumulation of random facts. I'm certainly willing to use afd to remove promotional junk so a better article can be written, but this is merely low level competence. Taking a wider look, many other general articles on the overall topic seem inadequate also, tho not as inadequate as this one. Taking things as a whole, our coverage or religion is perhaps our weakest area: the articles tend to be either inwardly focussed for various small groups going into disproportionate and uncritical detail, or superficial and condescending general treatments. Removing this article won't solve the problems. DGG ( talk ) 01:03, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the 2nd opinion. I just noticed that the article's creator also self reviewed his own article and gave it a B(!) rating. This is a mess. The only question in my mind right now is if it's fixable in its current form. -Ad Orientem (talk) 01:30, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

I think it is--the overall organization is OK, and the books seem like suitable refs. The problem is that doing it right will take some actual work in a library. DGG ( talk ) 05:14, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Joseph A. Petry

Hmmm... what's a "Clinical professor"? —Anne Delong (talk) 03:00, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

In medicine, a clinical professor is someone who supervises the students in their education in the medical facilities, where most of the upperclass education takes place, but not a classroom teacher. In other fields it's analogous--someone supervising in a legal clinic or the like. In this case, presumably finance laboratories or practicums. It is not in the least of the same implications of notability as a regular faculty position. It tends to be given to relatively important local practitioners. Most senior medical specialists will be at least Assistant Clinical Professors in one med school or another. For his individual notice the publication list: he actually includes what amounts to a course syllabus. No rational chance of passing afd. In mainspace, I'd consider it almost an A7. DGG ( talk ) 07:51, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, DGG, How about this one? Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Roshdi Rashed? —Anne Delong (talk) 13:55, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Definitely Notable. Emeritus professor at two famous universities. Multiple major prizes at anational and international levels. Editor of a leading journal in his field; editor of major encyclopedia; Author or editor of several dozen academic books, some translated int o multiple languages--I see besides the expected French, English, and Arabic, also Spanish , Italian, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish. I moved it to mainspace. Meets WP:AUTHOR, and several criteria of WP:PROF. That this should have been not accepted initially is a little surprising, even for the lack of understanding of the humanities so prevalent at WP. DGG ( talk ) 19:05, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Ali Riaz

Hi DGG - Not sure about this one... —Anne Delong (talk) 00:26, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

just looking at library holdings, he's almost certainly notable at least as author. The article needs some extensive revisions, which I started. The revisions are enough to defer it for 6 months, & I'll get it fixed on the next round if it doesn't get fixed sooner. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Interstate 2 has become eligible for G13. HasteurBot (talk) 01:34, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, DGG. You have new messages at Solarra's talk page.
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♥ Solarra ♥ ^{♪ Talk ♪ ♀ Contribs ♀} 02:47, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Talkback

i have read the policies for deleting, and much more, it states that an article that has an open discussion or was approved by and administrator cannot be put up for deleting again besides it also mentions there are other alternatives disputes over page content are usually not dealt with by deleting the page, except in severe cases. why are you doing this for Multiverse then? Jose Cuello (talk) 06:21, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

• • I've left a comment at the AfD. DGG ( talk ) 15:05, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

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AfD menotring

Hello DGG; Dennis is unavailable right now, so would you be willing to help out with my AfD mentoring (User:StringTheory11/AfD)? I would greatly appreciate it. StringTheory11 (t • c) 05:46, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you.

	The Working Man's Barnstar
	For tireless devotion to temporarily restoring articles being considered at deletion review -- RoySmith (talk) 15:30, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Anthony M. Gould

Hello again, DGG. One more professor for you. —Anne Delong (talk) 10:24, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm going to go thru all the steps:

1. .It's a complete copyvio of his official p. at Griffith University [9], where he's a visitor. . Had I not found it there, I would have looked for the one at his home university, Laval. First step with a page on any member of an organization, or on an organization). If they don't give it themselves, it's all the more likely.
2. often the copyvio page is so bad that in addition to deleting it, I make clear in the message that there's no point in suggesting the give permission. This isn't that bad, tho we would do some rearrangement to put the bio before the work. If he were of very highest international quality, I might even simply rewrite.
3. He's not, so the question is whether he is notable enough to support an article. He has no books , but he's in a field where not all good people do. Book chapters are normally ignored. Looking at his papers , I see not that they are not in recognizable 1st rate journals, but I know I might fail to recognize all the major journals in this subject field.
   1. Looking in Google Scholar (and sorting out from other "AM Gould" s by subject-field, I see the most cited has9 cites, which is clearly not going to be enough. (there's one possible with 33, but looking at the publisher's abstract to see the author's institution, it's not likely to be him)
   2. Double checking with his publication list, because the article specifies J. L. Hist. is a reputable journal , and in ISI, & I would expect a publication there to be cited, I look for a list at the other references listed. At Cornell, where he was a visiting fellow, I find only the identical bio; The CIRA p. does not list members. The Laval one is the p. for a Laval Journal for which he is a book reviewer (another indication he might not be notable, for one would not normally include that if one had anything more substantial).
   3. I then look for his faculty page at Laval, and find a listing as Anthony Morven Gould. It doesn;'t lead to a web p., just an email, browsing around the site, Ii find in Expertise under Recherche (only in the French version of the bilingual site) [10]. Under its "Les sites individuels des professeurs chercheurs" I do not find him. I then go to Google and find [11] and find a little more, but still no publication list. Every academic has a CV with a full publication list, tho they are sometimes not accessible on line. His does not seem to be.
4. There's a problem with his title "Professeur agrégé" In the French university system, this is not a full professorship and does not carry tenure (it's primarily the rank of teachers in the higher secondary schools ) In Quebec, I do not know; they do not follow the French university system. Looking at University of Montreal, I find it corresponds to Associate professor, not full professor.

Therefore, I would suggest you simply mark it for delete as copyvio. I hold off a little so you can see it. There's no point telling him to rewrite it, because it will not be accepted in any case, but there's also no point in saying that if it isnt necessary. I can now also clear up our articles on the various ranks. DGG ( talk ) 17:23, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Wow, you really dug into that one! Thanks for applying your expertise. I should have noticed the copyvio. —Anne Delong (talk) 02:10, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Vasant Dhar

I'm not too good at evaluating the notability of academics and I know you are; what do you think of this one? Thanks, Black Kite (talk) 20:12, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

I haven't checked the publications yet, but very likely to be notable. I did some basic editing. This is standard university-press release writing, and there may be copyvio. DGG ( talk ) 02:23, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi, will be adding back info and reordering per Vasant Dhar's request (ex: para about children, deleted fields, titles). Thanks, Stern IOMS (talk) 15:18, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Stern IOMS (talk · contribs)< you are an editor with a conflict of interest, and have added back material that is inappropriate. I've adjusted the article to a more standard form, used correct italics and links,and removed additional minor material. There's more needed. You may make suggestions on the article talk page, but not edit the article. We do not add material to articles on request of the subject, as you say you have done--that counts as promotion, which is prohibited. This is an encyclopedia, not a who's who.

I should add, that looking at the material again, I see the journal is only newly established, and am therefore not sure of notability. If you insist on including puffery, claiming expertise in multiple fields on the basis of having published a single article on it, and relying of press releases and the thoroughly unreliable New York Post for claims of importance in having a key role in founding a university project, the article is much more likely to be nominated for deletion. DGG ( talk ) 20:29, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

• DGG, by chance I happened upon the article (via BK's talk page). Stern IOMS, I have pruned considerably: various claims made about the subject turned out to have been based on the subject's own publications. I've also removed trivial family information, and the flags from the infobox. I have no real opinion on notability--though I don't see it yet. Drmies (talk) 21:41, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

DGG and Drmies, appreciate your dedication to editing this page. Will follow your advice about adding suggestions to the article talk page.Stern IOMS (talk) 20:09, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Martin & Meditations on the South Valley

Hi DGG, don't you think Martin & Meditations on the South Valley should be moved back again to AfC? It is almost entirely self-cited to itself. There are no reliable secondary sources. Sionk (talk) 23:28, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

It is cited to itself as a factual description of the content as is not only permitted but preferred; it is cited to a recognized authority in literature for interpretation. (Levertov is indeed writing in the introduction to the book, which is not completely independent, but sufficiently independent for a famous authority in her field.) As for notability, the book won a significant award. I consider this enough to start with. It would obviously be even better if more were added, and I shall do that in the next few days. The informal guideline for putting an article in mainspace is that it probably would not be deleted at afd; some people interpret "probably" at 50%; I personally use a higher standard of 60 or 70%.

The justification for this is that in mainspace the article is exposed to the general editing and reading community, and will be seen and added to in the same way as other WP articles. In draft space it will be seen by almost nobody, unless the original author should miraculously appear--which happens about 1% of the time. In fact, I consider it an error that it was not accepted initially, and a further error--my own error--that in initially reviewing it after 6 months I postponed decision rather than accepting it then and there. I went to a large part by the appearance of insufficient sources, with out looking carefully to see if the sources supported the content.

I very much appreciate it that you are looking at material I accept--I need this sort of criticism to make sure I continue to align myself with community standards. I don't think I went to far in this one, but I know by experience that I eventually make some errors. DGG ( talk ) 01:30, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I simply looked at the article out of curiosity, wondering what the subject matter was. I've wikilinked the ABA and changed the cleanup template. Sionk (talk) 04:05, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to WikiProject TAFI

	Hello, DGG. You're invited to join WikiProject Today's articles for improvement. Feel free to nominate an article for improvement at the project's Nominated articles page. Also feel free to contribute to !voting for new weekly selections at the project's talk page. If interested in joining, please add your name to the list of members. NorthAmerica1000 16:36, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Jebi Mather Hisham

Hi DGG, Could you take a look at Jebi Mather Hisham when you have time. As far as I can tell she fails WP:NPOL. But per WP:POLOUTCOMES - "Municipal politicians are not inherently notable just for being in politics, but neither are they inherently non-notable just because they are in local politics." I'd appreciate your input. Regards,  NQ  talk 18:04, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

it seemed simpler to list it at afd and give my opinion there. See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jebi Mather Hisham. (I was also thinking about G11, but though the intent is promotional, the wording isn't). Good catch. DGG ( talk ) 20:51, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! When the article was created, I almost listed it under G11, but hesitated. I kept a watch for further improvements but there were none. Appreciate the help.  NQ  talk 21:20, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you

I just saw a note that you contested the prod of the Talk:Capt. William Bull Tavern. I thank you for that! I've been going about researching different properties and making a bunch of Good Articles in the process, bringing all that I am able to find with my research to bear on these types of articles. It may be small now, but I'll likely have it at Good Article Nominations before too long. Thanks for halting the deletion of a notable and (very much historic) property, I probably would not have been able to recreate it easily if not for your action. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 21:56, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Burghardt Wittig

Hi DGG. I reported this at Wikiproject Biology, but it was deleted before anyone could look at it. Is it worth reviving? —Anne Delong (talk) 01:46, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I restored it to permit improvement. This is a tricky one; though I previously commented "clearly notable", I have since realized that I am not really completely sure of notability. It will need further work to improve the article as possible, and then afd can decide. DGG ( talk ) 02:51, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't think I am explaining what a researcher does clearly enough

There are problems at Robert Spitzer (political scientist) and I brought this complaint to WP:AN for reasons explained in detail there. Both now and when the issue came up back in January I find that I have a hard time getting editors to understand what an academic researcher does, how it differs from being an advocate for something, and why being an unbiased researcher matters to an academic career. My latest attempt at explanation is here. Could you take a look at this? Thanks. StarryGrandma (talk) 06:00, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

I responded to the problem as I saw it. For future reference, I think it's generally fairer to just notify me of a problem, not guide me to what I should look at. My practice is to say who notified me, but not to pay too much attention to what position that person takes, tho I usually can't avoid seeing it DGG ( talk ) 13:07, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for looking. My question was more a matter of wondering why I wasn't able to be more effective. Thanks for your careful response on the talk page. You are right about Spitzer working in a controversial area and needing to deal with being characterized as an advocate. I was upset by Spitzer's concern over the problems on his page back in January and now. I wish there was some way of limiting Wikipedia disputes to Wikipedia.

I suppose more content on the page about the rest of his academic career would help reduce any undue weight. I had hoped to avoid editing there. I will wait a while and if the current set of editors don't build it up I will put in his academic development, etc. StarryGrandma (talk) 02:22, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

It always helps to put in well cited objective material of importance; just avoid adding marginal material such as college career or family or hobbies. DGG ( talk ) 04:32, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Louis Jonker

Hallo David, you expanded this substantially but it's now at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Louis Jonker - you might like to have a look. PamD 12:25, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

commented there DGG ( talk ) 01:54, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Reveiw

Hi DGG, if it isn't a bother, could you take a quick look and review - Robert E. Olds, Joseph P. Cotton, Marcus M. Haskell, Osgood T. Hadley and Henry A. Hammel These are my first five article creations, I'm in the process of creating rest of the missing Civil War recipients of the Medal of Honor. There seems to be quite a backlog at New Page Patrol. Regards,  NQ  talk 22:19, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

1 point: in addition to saying in a general note that the material is copied from the US govt site, it's best to indicate by quotation marks exactly what has been copied--is it just the quotation in the box? then add it in the footnote there. DGG ( talk ) 02:28, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Only the MOH citation is copied verbatim from the Public domain material. The general note added is a template {{ACMH}} . I am not sure there is a parameter to include exactly which portion is copied.  NQ  talk 02:40, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

I will find a way to do it. DGG ( talk ) 02:51, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, DGG. You have new messages at ArcAngel's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Two questions for you

1) Would this userpage qualify for G5? And 2) What is your opinion on another RfA from me, given another 6 months or so of sustained activity? Reason I ask is that in working with draft articles recently, I find that if I had the mop I wouldn't have to place G6 tags on drafts that needed to be merged (I could just do it myself), and I could delete those that were tagged with G2 also.   ArcAngel   (talk) ) 17:25, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

as far as I can tell from the block log and the SPI investigation, the user page was created before the user was blocked. It would have to be done through MfD.

The continuing activity should include a variety of activities. You might want to recheck some of your article creations to see if they would still meet your standards, and possibly write a few more. It would also help to do definitive decisions on more afc pages, instead of just moving them. (and giving a few the complete rewrite they need would also help show content creation). Be warned however that if people want to oppose, they will use any reason they can find, no matter how old or irrelevant. DGG ( talk ) 00:35, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Re: G5 - Ok, I'll send it to Mfd. Re: RFA - Yea, it can be rigorous, and I do plan to do more as far as content creation goes as from what I have seen the past few years there, that seems to be one of the main reasons for opposing - but also one of the reasons I am sticking my hand in the AfC fire at the moment. . I also want to improve on my CSD taggings, as on the two RFA's I have been through, that was the main reason for the opposes on both. Thanks for the advice, I will go through my articles and see if they are actually up to the standards of Wikipedia.   ArcAngel   (talk) ) 00:53, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

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Draft:David_Germano

Hi David

Would you kindly take look at Draft:David_Germano - I'm asking as I see you made some improvements on an article about David Germano's colleague Kurtis Schaeffer. I'm puzzled why the article on Schaeffer was acceptable while the one on Germano was declined. Germano is certainly prominent in his field, and as the Editor in Chief of JIATS right away appears to meet the Criteria for inclusion (#8). He is also the founder and director of the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (www.thlib.org) - a truly major digital resource in the field of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. Thanks Chris Fynn (talk) 15:42, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

I accepted it. The criterion for acceptance at AfC is a reasonable chance that the article will pass WP:AFD. In thiscase, the relevant standard is WP:PROF, and he probably meets it. (I cannot say certainly will be accepted at AfD, because there has been resistance there in the past for people in the humanities, definitely including religion, and especially in fields whose publications or career record do not fit into the convention pattern,. If challenged, let me know, I will certainly defend it, but I cannot count on seeing the discussion unless you tell me) Don't expect consistency at RfA--at least 25% of the reviews over the last few years have been unhelpful--or clearly wrong. It's a little better now, but only a little. This is a relatively new reviewer--I will try to explain to them.

BTW, we need some basic biography--date and place of birth, dates of degrees. , DGG ( talk ) 16:52, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

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Wholesale Revision: Carbone Smolan Agency

Would you revisit this draft of an article continue to revise? First, I simply would like to know HOW to move it to the Article for Creation without losing the data and content. This is the existing link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Carbone_Smolan_Agency

Per advice, I have deleted quotes from the agency, delete names of others mentioned and simplified so that I now hope that this will soon become the FIRST accepted article for publication in series of similar about leaders in the field of American Graphic Design. I believe that I have answered all the latest concerns raised by other Wiki editors about the story. Porterwritewiki (talk) 21:22, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

I have moved the article (which I think you had moved to User:PorterWritewiki:Carbone Smolan Agency to the currently preferred place, Draft:PorterWritewiki:Carbone Smolan Agency.

The first thing to do is to reorganize in our standard arrangement: there should be one lede paragraph, without any section heading, acting as a summary of the others; it does not have to be referenced, because the references will be in the following paragraphs. . The usual first paragraph of the main body is a history of the company. I would suggest following that by a section of "Works", as for a creative artist. The individual major works should be subsections of that. Then comes the awards, though it may be somewhat redundant with the works--it would normally include only national or international awards, and the more selective the better it indicates notability.

Second the references need to be cited in one of our standard forms, which must include the title and author of the item, the place & date it was published in both print and online (if both are applicable), and (if applicable) the date the link was accessed. The best way is to use the templates--see WP:CITEBEGIN for the basic explanation. Do not use the word "see" -- it's implied by the reference. List them only once, as footnotes, not also in a separate section at the end. Do use a section at the end "External Links" for such things as their web site. If youare citing print,

third, try if at all possible to find a freely licensed illustration, or one for which you have obtained permission. It should ideally be one of their works--a single fair use illustration is possible, if you write an adequate justification.

fourth, try to write without using adjectives or expressions of praise of excellence. Let the plain facts show it. Write compactly. Avoid vague expressions like "such as..." Use only the last name of people after the first mention (or even better, "he" or "they"). Avoid jargon like "communicate principles and convictions"

Let me know when you think it's ready, DGG ( talk ) 02:32, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Draft:Noel T. Boaz

I think this looks good. Can you review and approve it? Bearian (talk) 22:28, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

done, though I may do some further touch-ups. DGG ( talk ) 05:57, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

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election deletion

Another user has nominated an additional article for deletion from the century old Welsh elections list Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Aberdare_Urban_District_Council_election,_1902 I was thinking of notifying the participants in the DRV, but did not know if that would run afoul of WP:CANVASS - As this new nomination is likely to either reinforce the micro-precedent set in the previous discussion, or be used as evidence for overturning that decision, what do you think would be the best way to get wider participation and try to get a real consensus that might help inform future actions? Gaijin42 (talk) 01:16, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I commented at the afd. DGG ( talk ) 01:53, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Editor evaluation

DGG, would you consider doing an editor evaluation of yours truly? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:15, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

commented. DGG ( talk ) 02:23, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

[section removed as advertising)

Deletion of draft

"I regret it, but it seems necessary for me to recommend deletion of the draft as unambiguous advertising. I have the power to delete it myself, but I normally prefer that another administrator agree. DGG ( talk ) 00:27, 18 August 2014 (UTC)"

Dear Dr Goodman,

We apologize for any perceived impropriety - we intended our response for your academic elucidations. You may proceed to delete our message accordingly.

Also since we take exceptions to some assumptions you've stated we kindly request you delete your unsolicited comments too. Could you please acknowledge?

Wikisjt3 (talk) 02:17, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

If you wish to remove material from your user talk page, you have the right to do so. DGG ( talk ) 03:32, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Emad Rahim (2nd nomination)

FYI as first nominator; in particular, your views are requested on the claim that an appointment as "Distinguished Entrepreneur-in-Residence" meets WP:PROF #5. JohnCD (talk) 14:35, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

commented there. DGG ( talk ) 02:23, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

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invite

You are invited to offer your two cents here. Schmidt, ^{Michael Q.} 07:41, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

commented ~

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Frank D’Accone (musicologist)

Hi DGG. This semi-retired professor is cited all over the place. I added a few book references. Can you pass your expert eye over it? —Anne Delong (talk) 13:20, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

The best screen for notability for anyone in the humanities is WorldCat, which immediately shows he received a Festschrift. And if anyone has an article in Grove, he's notable. As is often the case, the article is not organized to clearly show the factors that make for notability here. But it needs some adjustments: we don't include journal articles in the bibliography.

It was immediately acceptable as it was originally submitted, even without your improvements. As a demonstration, I'm accepting it first and will fix it later, in order to clarify that any article with a reasonable chance of passing afd (which some people define as >1/2, but I look for >2/3), should be accepted. This was 100%. DGG ( talk ) 14:16, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

I thought you'd like it. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:33, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) A point of order here. Is the disambig (musicologist) really needed on this draft? I don't believe it is as there are no other articles named Frank D’Accone.   ArcAngel   (talk) ) 20:59, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2014 August 16#File:Hearts XP.png

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2014 August 16#File:Hearts XP.png. Thanks. Dogmaticeclectic (talk) 18:02, 21 August 2014 (UTC)Template:Z48

commented. DGG ( talk ) 21:06, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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Notes About Lion's Heart page

You recently docketed a page for the community service group "Lion's Heart" as promotional, necessitating deletion. I was working with user Dodger67 on it, about how to remove any promotional language and to get references and everything else properly set to Wikipedia standards. I've worked with Lion's Heart, Alpha Phi Omega, Boy Scouts of America, and other community groups. Seeing as they did not have a page, I thought it would be a good first page for me to attempt. Apparently this isn't the case. Perhaps you could offer some insight into how to improve the page?

I see that you have some essays written, and quite a bit of text about Wikipedia and how it works- I shall endeavor to read and remove any promotional language. For now, my assumption is that using the same newspaper for a few of the reference citations was not prudent, and needs to be corrected. (If you've already written topics on this, please don't feel a need to reply, I'm getting around to reading guides on promotional language, as well as the archived Talk topics on your page here about their answers.)

Absolutelyang (talk) 03:07, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

I noticed that article when reviewing the afc approvals of that editor, in connection with his request for adminship, which is now pending. I consider it a characteristic example of his incorrect approvals. You removed the Prod tag, as is permitted. I have listed it for an AfD discussion, to see what the community thinks, because I think there is also no substantial notability. See my comments there, at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lion’s Heart DGG ( talk ) 03:41, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

NPP

I have often thought that a possible set of criteria of competency to patrol new pages should include:

• 500 edits to main space and/or holder of 'Reviewer' and 'Rollback' flags with an established record of accuracy.
• 3 months tenure
• No CSDd or PRODed own creations.
• A demonstrated level of maturity when communicating with other editors.
• A declaration that they have reqd qnd understood WP:NPP and WP:DELETION

Implementation:

A list such as the AfC reviewer list. Anyone adding their name to the list and not meeting the ctiteria will be removed and asked to stop patrolling. Any patrollers patrolling without issue over the preceding 12 months to be grandfathered in.

getting there:

Perhaps an RfC could bring forth such measures, but I rather fear it would not be supported by Foundation staff whether or not they edit under their staff or volunteer accounts - we've had such issues before.

--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:34, 22 August 2014 (UTC).

the jurisdiction over whom we give permissions is our own. We can implement this ourself via an admin board--it doesn't have to be a formal user right. We are indeed dependent on them for the implementation of a new right, and frankly, I'd rather not ask them for that--I think the rights matrix is too splintered already. This is nowhere near as basic as the right to submit a new article, which was the problem you allude to where they objected.

It doesn't much matter what level we choose, we can adjust it later. Difficulty in deciding such detail has defeated many good proposals in the past. The point is to implement some level to establish the principle. For simplicity I suggest it be the same for AfD and NPP. DGG ( talk ) 05:21, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Help with a discussion?

Hey DGG, you're kind of the policy guru here when it comes to policies on book stuff. I'm currently in a discussion with an editor at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Carver Trilogy and I admit, I'm starting to lose my patience a little. Long story short, someone is trying to argue that the trilogy (which is actually called "Ivory Carver Trilogy") is not notable. The individual books have received reviews (many of which can be seen in merchant pages but never made it to the Internet) but the editor is arguing that individual reviews do not count towards overall notability for the series because they don't mention that it's a series or go into depth about it being a series. He's also arguing the trade review angle and while I do understand the argument for that, there's not been an official consensus on that as of yet. (But that's sort of beside the point since there are enough reviews and articles otherwise to show proof of coverage.) Can you just step in and kind of confirm that reviews for the books can show notability for the series? And that it's fairly common to keep an article on a series even when the individual books might not warrant an article to themselves? Some confirmation from a second person would be nice, as it'd confirm that it's not just me making up policies on my own. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 05:57, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

I commented. The guideline basis for this is in WP:N -- "Editors may use their discretion to merge or group two or more related topics into a single article." DGG ( talk ) 08:37, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

• Thank you so much!! I wasn't really getting anywhere with him. I do think that he means well, but it was just getting frustrating. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 10:44, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

Thanks for your help! Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 10:45, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Community Child Care Co-operative (NSW) page

Hello DGG,

You mentioned the issue on this page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Child_Care_Co-operative_%28NSW%29) as "Promotional page for local co-op. All non-press release references are about general topics that only mention the organization".

Deletion would be a bit harsh - the organisation is a peak body and non-government organisation in New South Wales, Australia, and represents over 1800 member organisations. The references that you refer to have been edited out, but could you please indicate the non-press release references that should also be removed? Thanks, E.jokovich (talk) 12:36, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Refs 2, 3, 4, and 5 are about the general funding of child care in NSW. (similarly 1 in all probability,, tho I can;t see it) Ref 6, 9, and 10 sre general problems. The Coop wrote no. 7, 12, 13, and 15. 8 is the bio of the director. Its reliable as a bio, but doesn't show notability. And the of list of staff members is not of encyclopedic interest.

But perhaps I misinterpreted. Is this the main agency responsible for all childcare venters in the State, or for all independent centers ? Is it an advisory service, or an administrative service, or a service agency for its members? Can you provide a ref that shows this clearly? If its the book, page numbers and a quote would be needed. How many total centers are under its jurisdiction,or if jurisdiction too strong a word,, now many is it responsible for advising. How many staff, how many students ? I may be able to help you rewrite it for a clearer presentation. DGG ( talk ) 14:09, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Business Application Support has become eligible for G13. HasteurBot (talk) 01:30, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

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Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Carlton Bailey (Law Professor)

Here's one for you, DGG. —Anne Delong (talk) 01:33, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

needs thought--it's a distinguished professorship, but I'm not quite sure what's distinguished. DGG ( talk ) 05:13, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

19:17:03, 25 August 2014 review of submission by Danaostomel

• Danaostomel (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:Deposit a Gift (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

I have made several revisions to the first draft I submitted. Overall, the new draft is certainly less of an advertisement and more of an unbiased article that is intended to provide information to the general reader about the company. However, I don't quite understand how there are absolutely no adequate sources. I specifically read over both articles that you provided in your initial rejection as I was writing the first draft, and I considered the sources used by crowdfunding competitors as a model including GoFundMe, KickStarter, and Indiegogo. I know that if I submit my new draft it will likely be rejected once again, but if you could please provide me with help and/or advice so that I can ultimately submit an acceptable article it would be highly appreciated. 

Danaostomel (talk) 19:17, 25 August 2014 (UTC)