Talk:John P. Gray (naval officer)

Removed proposed deletion tag
I removed the Proposed Deletion tag from this article. The proposed deletion was based on the premise that the subject is not a notable military person based on Wikipedia guidelines. Several factors need to be consider prior to nomination of the article for deletion, including (but not necessarily limited to): 1) The U.S. Navy viewed the subject as notable enough in his time to name a ship after him; that should carry more weight than the opinion of a Wikipedia editor (albeit a well-meaning one) who happens across the article and knows nothing about the subject, and iit should tip the balance toward retention of the article. 2) The article is intended to – and objectively does – complement an article on the ship named after him. Deletion of the biography article would make it impossible for readers of the ship article who are interested in the ship's namesake (and many are) to read more about its namesake. If we have information about the ship's namesake, there should be an article the ship's info box NAMESAKE field can link to. 3) Deleting the article would seem to impair Wikipedia's ability to make information available publicly without achieiving anything positive to balance out the loss of information (unless Wikipedia's servers are so crammed to capacity and have such storage issues that some articles need to be deleted).

Having said all of this, I understand that the subject's name is no longer a household word. While I believe that current popularity of a subject is not a good measure of an article's value – indeed, Wikipedia is an important vehicle for making information on less-currently-popular subjects available to the average Web surfer – I also believe that the subject's former importance merits an article. If an aggressive Wikipedia deleter (and there are some out there) really feels that this article must go, then I would argue that deletion is inappropriate. Instead a merge of this article into the ship article would preserve the information instead of destroying it and is a more appropriate approach. To my mind, that would be a "make work" project that doesn't really leave Wikipedia users any better off and unnecessarily blends ship history with biography, but it is a far better alternative to a destructive act of deletion. Mdnavman (talk) 12:56, 4 March 2016 (UTC)mdnavman