Talk:Cottage Grove Police Department (Oregon)

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This page was nominated at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion on 17 January 2024. The result of the discussion was Restore.

Notability and citations

To make this notable, don't add more citations from the police department/city. Add them from third party, reliable sources such as newspapers, magazines, books, journals, etc. See the guideline on notability for more info. Aboutmovies (talk) 04:25, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Citations don't usually make an article notable, they only provide evidence. It has been generally established through consensus that all municipal law enforcement agencies in the USA are sufficiently notable for inclusion. In addition for a smaller police department it will be very difficult to find references for such facts as staffing from sources other than press releases from the actual department. And for all intents and purpose such a reference is a reliable source for this article, as after all the department itself would know best who it employs and what departments it consists of. In any case I have now added a section establishing CGPD's notability through recent news coverage. --Pump me up 20:24, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You are right, on two counts: their press releases would be considered reliable sources, and citations only provide the evidence. However, since press releases are not independent, they provide zero indication of notability. And without evidence, we don't know they are notable (this is why the article is tagged with the notability tag and not a PROD or AFD). And, this is still subject to WP:ORG, or the general WP:NOTE, and there is not an exception for municipal police departments, as far as I know. If you can point me to that guideline, please do, otherwise these are taken on a case by case basis. I agree most police departments will in the end pass, but that is not a free pass for people to go around writing what amounts to fan pages about police departments. When we write articles based only on what the police put out, there are serious issues with WP:NPOV, as they tend not to include anything negative in those statements. Here, there is a local newspaper in Cottage Grove and a regional paper from Eugene that should provide plenty of independent sources to demonstrate the notability. Hopefully we can all agree we need encyclopedic articles, and not police fan pages - which is what it looked like before you added the child porn item. Aboutmovies (talk) 20:47, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]