Talk:List of breweries in San Diego County, California

Inclusion criteria?
For most lists like this, the inclusion criteria for entries is having their own Wikipedia article. See WP:WTAF

Minimally, each entry has to be verifiable. To avoid WP:NOTDIRECTORY, WP:NOTADVERTISING, and WP:NPOV problems, each entry without it's own article should be verified by independent, reliable sources. --Ronz (talk) 17:24, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * That does not appear to be true in practice. At lists like List of breweries in California (which provided the germ of this list), List of breweries in Australia, List of breweries in Quebec, and others, I observed that many or most of the entries have neither a Wikipedia article nor a reference link. I modeled this list on those - which I take to be the established practice here. --MelanieN (talk) 17:49, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * It's not established practice, as pointed out in the material that you removed --Ronz (talk) 21:21, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, I saw those instructions. I also saw that no one pays any attention to them at the other lists I looked at, so I left them out when I copied the list over. I agree that the "rules" you are citing are in accordance with general Wikipedia policy, and I appreciate your desire to keep these lists clean. However, the fact that no one abides by this policy in the case of breweries looks like consensus (or "established practice") to me. It didn't seem right to me that this should be the only brewery list on Wikipedia to limit itself in this way. --MelanieN (talk) 21:33, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, I see that you stripped out most of the entries at List of breweries in California to satisfy these criteria. Do you plan to do the same for all the other brewery lists on Wikipedia? Do you think that will have consensus, or will people object and put them back? If those rules are enforced Wiki-wide I'm fine with enforcing them here as well. Somewhere I saw suggestions, I think from WikiProject beer, about notability for breweries and how to handle small breweries; I'll try to find that again and see what it says. --MelanieN (talk) 21:42, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Here it is: Notability (breweries). It suggests creating regional articles about breweries, to include all those that don't quite merit an article of their own. I have seen a few such articles (not many), with the individual breweries having redirects to the main page, for example Rock Bottom Restaurant Breweries. I guess that's what the instructions I ignored mean, when they talk about requiring a link to "an article or an article section". --MelanieN (talk) 21:49, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Interesting: I see that those stern instructions were added just last month, by user:Mercurywoodrose, but they did not actually delete anything; they left in all the breweries that violated the strict criteria they were proposing! No wonder it was confusing. --MelanieN (talk) 22:01, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * If they meet the criteria of Notability (breweries), including the required sources, there shouldn't be a problem. --Ronz (talk) 02:29, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

See the Notablity guidelines which say "Notability guidelines do not limit content within an article". Also the manual of style for list selection criteria. I think a list of breweries could come under the criteria for "Short, complete lists of every item that is verifiably a member of the group." --Vclaw (talk) 12:31, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Can "verifiably a member of the group" be demonstrated by a link to the brewery's own webpage, as I saw at one such list, or does it have to be an independent reliable source? --MelanieN (talk) 16:12, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Let's just follow Notability (breweries). Using their own pages is problematic in multiple ways, as I pointed out at the start of this discussion. --Ronz (talk) 16:35, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia:Notability (breweries) is just an essay. What matters is the policy of Verifiability, so material should be verifiable from reliable sources. I think a brewery's own webpage would be considered as a "self published source", so probably not considered to be reliable. --Vclaw (talk) 17:14, 24 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Since no one is disagreeing with having criteria with the criteria, I've cleaned up the list.
 * Does someone want to search for sources at this point? --Ronz (talk) 15:54, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * So can I assume that over the next few days you will also be cleaning up List of breweries in Quebec, List of breweries in Maine, List of breweries in North Carolina, List of breweries in Pennsylvania, and List of breweries in Scotland ? --MelanieN (talk) 16:12, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * That's irrelevant to this discussion, but thanks for pointing them out. --Ronz (talk) 16:28, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * It may be irrelevant to you. To me, it is fundamentally unfair to hold San Diego and California to a strict standard that is not applied elsewere in the wiki. Yes, I know, WP:OTHERSTUFF and all that. But since you clearly care about this, I figured you would want to apply the same standard to the other lists as well. --MelanieN (talk) 16:57, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * There's nothing unfair about it. It's not a stricter standard, it's the standard. --Ronz (talk) 17:26, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, and I have accepted it here. But I want to see it applied uniformly, not just here. --MelanieN (talk) 18:25, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I must be missing something here. The title of the article is "List of Breweries in San Diego County, California." Not "List of Particularly Notable Breweries in San Diego County, CA". Surely, the title alone argues for an inclusive list, as you're otherwise intentionally producing an extremely (and arbitrarily) stunted list. There are somewhere between 60 and 100 breweries in San Diego County. This article, in its current incarnation, lists 15. While I could understand a criteria for demonstrating the existence of a given brewery, for the life of me I can't understand why on earth you would list only 'notable' breweries. I've read the talk page here, and the prevailing answer to that question seems to be, "Because." Can anyone actually explain the reasoning behind this to me? --Jredwards (talk) 21:07, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
 * No, the title alone does not argue for an inclusive list.
 * If you read the talk page arguments once again, I'm sure you'll see that the argument is because there is extremely broad consensus across Wikipedia, supported by multiple policies and guidelines including two of Wikipedias's pillars, calls for lists to be manageable and verifiable. In cases of lists like this one, a list of companies, the entries need to be notable. --Ronz (talk) 21:20, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I actually agree with Jredwards. I also feel (and have said, both above and below) that the breweries don't have to be "notable" to be on this list. They have to either 1) have a Wikipedia article (in which case they are presumably notable) or 2) be verified by a link to an independent reliable source (which is not enough for notability but enough to be included on this list IMO). That's what the edit-warning heading on the list says, and that's the criterion I thought we were applying. (And even that is way stricter than the criterion that seems to be applied to most other "list of breweries" articles at Wikipedia - which I have never understood for a county sometimes called "the craft brewing capital of the United States.") --MelanieN (talk) 21:51, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree with the criteria you give. Sorry that my summarizing caused any confusion about those points which have been made multiple times now. --Ronz (talk) 00:03, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Inclusion criteria, redux
The article currently warns at the top, ''DO NOT add breweries/brewpubs/microbreweries to this list unless they already have Wikipedia articles, or could reasonably be expected to be the subject of an article or article section. For names not linked to articles or article sections, you must provide at least one reference from a reliable source indicating the subjects notability as a brewery in San Diego County, or the name will be removed. For notability criteria, please see the article's talk page.'' Based on the discussion here, it appears that this warning - to list only beers that have Wikipedia articles or could reasonably be expected to have Wikipedia articles - does not have consensus. The criterion I proposed above, which Ronz eventually agreed with, is VERIFIABILITY, not notability (in the sense of notable enough for a standalone article). I said the items on the list should either 1) have a Wikipedia article (in which case they are presumably notable) or 2) be verified by a link to an independent reliable source. Ronz said he agreed with this. Vclaw and Jredwards have also argued for the "verifiability" criterion. Seriously, if we limit this list to breweries that are notable enough for their own article, what's the point of having a list? It's just a duplicate of a category.

This comes to my attention (again) because a new editor just added half a dozen breweries to the list, carefully providing citations to an independent source - and then they read this page and deleted all their additions! That is just wrong. Despite the drastic pruning of the list which Ronz has insisted on, there is no consensus here to limit the list to notable breweries. I am going to rewrite the warning at the top of the page to specify verifiability rather than notability, and I am going to re-add the recent additions which were the subject of independent coverage. --MelanieN (talk) 11:03, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I suggest you re-read my comments. --Ronz (talk) 16:57, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I have seen you say, multiple times, that you think the criterion should be notability/article worthy. But above when I said "I also feel (and have said, both above and below) that the breweries don't have to be "notable" to be on this list. They have to either 1) have a Wikipedia article (in which case they are presumably notable) or 2) be verified by a link to an independent reliable source (which is not enough for notability but enough to be included on this list IMO)," you replied "I agree with the criteria you give". So I proceeded on that basis. --MelanieN (talk) 19:13, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Page cleanup
I understand that we don't want this list filled with fake brewery names or for every homebrewer to list themselves here, so having some criteria for inclusion makes sense. But I keep seeing editors adding, in good faith, well-known local brewers and then seeing other editors remove those additions as "spam" simply because they lack a reference. How does having an editor who's not even familiar with the area delete the listing for Hess or Modern Times or some other name that any San Diego craft beer fan would recognize improve anything? Yeah, it makes things comply some self-imposed rule, but doesn't otherwise make the page better. If you want to improve the quality of this page, how about looking for references for unreferenced brewers? They're easy to find! So, a suggestion: before deleting an entry, make at least a minimal effort to find a reference first. Please? --Rmalouf (talk) 22:00, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Hello, User:Rmalouf, and thanks for coming here to talk about it! We appreciate your eagerness to improve Wikipedia's articles. In this case, there is no doubt that the brewery exists, but that is not the criterion. This article is not an indiscriminate list of every brewery in the County; it is supposed to be breweries that are "notable". They used to insist that the brewery had to have an actual Wikipedia article, but I was able to get that modified to say it needs EITHER an article or else a significant reference from an Independent Reliable Source. (You can read that discussion higher up on this page.) This is not an arbitrary rule; it is part of Wikipedia's notability criteria, as interpreted by the members of WikiProject Beer. There is a note at the top of this article's edit page saying DO NOT add breweries/brewpubs/microbreweries to this list unless they either have a Wikipedia article or are verified by at least one substantial reference from a reliable source. Breweries which do not meet these criteria will be removed. For inclusion criteria, please see the article's talk page.
 * Most of the substantial references have been either from the San Diego Union Tribune or the San Diego Reader (because they are Reliable Sources and they both have regular beer writers, Brandon Hernandez and Peter Rowe). The blog San Diego Eater does not seem to meet the Wikipedia's standards for a WP:Reliable source. I didn't notice that a couple of breweries had gotten listed with only that as their source; I'll take at look at those, they may have to go. But the solution is simple: as soon as Peter or Brandon or some other Reliable Source writes a significant piece about Modern Times or Belching Beaver or any other newish brewery, that will qualify them to be listed here. And since Peter and Brandon like to write about new breweries, that shouldn't take long; for all I know that may have happened already. (BTW please don't go assuming that other editors are "not even familiar with the area". As a matter of fact I am very familiar with the local beer scene. I wrote this article, as well as the article Beer in San Diego County, California, as well as the "beer history" and "beer culture" sections in various articles about San Diego.) --MelanieN (talk) 22:50, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the response! Can you be more specific about which of the criteria listed in Independent Reliable Source and WP:Reliable source that the Eater fails to meet? What about the West Coaster... would that count? Any other sources? Anyway, a quick search of the Reader's archives shows that Brandon Hernandez has written several pieces on both Belching Beaver and Modern Times. The same appears to be the case with Peter Rowe at the UT, though it's all behind a paywall. If those guys the ones who determine notability, then they're notable.  But, there's a philosophical issue here I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around.  Take Hess, for example.  You and I both know that Hess is a well known up-and-coming brewery that's been getting a lot of attention in the San Diego beer world. It's gotten tons of press and takes no time to find half a dozen articles about it.  Hess should be listed on this page.  Having Hess listed without a reference violates the rule up at the top, I get that.  But why is everyone's first impulse to fix it by removing Hess (thereby making the page worse) rather than adding a reference (thereby making the page better)?  --Rmalouf (talk) 05:01, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry, the link I gave you is a shortcut and does not really define what a "reliable source" is - although it does say that most blogs are not considered reliable. Here's the actual definition, from WP:Identifying reliable sources: "reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy." That requirement basically means that there is editorial oversight ("fact-checking") and that the source has a reputation for accuracy. Regular newspapers, mainstream (as opposed to partisan or POV) television news programs, peer-reviewed journals are example of such sources. Blogs, which are written by an individual or a few individuals, have no such reputation; the person writes their piece and up it goes on the blog, with no editorial oversight. But cheer up: if you have located significant coverage from the San Diego Reader, just add one of those pieces and presto! the brewery stays! BTW a statement like "You and I both know that Hess is a well known up-and-coming brewery that's been getting a lot of attention in the San Diego beer world" - that may be true but it accomplishes nothing to establish notabilty. Personal experience or personal opinion like that is called WP:Original research and it's not appropriate or acceptable for an encyclopedia. OK, sorry for the short course on reliable sources, but now you know a lot more about what is and isn't acceptable at an encyclopedia - and how to get your favorite breweries listed! Significant coverage (not a passing mention) from Brandon or Peter will keep them on this list. A major medal or two ("major" means from the World Beer Cup or the Great American Beer Festival) is generally enough for an article. --MelanieN (talk) 05:29, 12 September 2014 (UTC)