Talk:Tulsa Fire Department

This article was nominated for deletion on 9 March 2020. The result of the discussion was speedy keep.

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Notability[edit]

It has come to my attention that an editor has added a notability tag to this page, yet not stated how the page is not notable for Wikipedia standards. The article is about a fire department that operates for a city of over 400,000 people with multiple stations, and had a budget of millions. These are some examples of notability seeing as how this fire department is not small in size nor does not serve a small rural community. The page additionally lists several sources for its information backing up its reliability. The standard of which a page meets notability are subjective, but I feel like the editor who added the tag did not take the factors I listed into hand, and so i believe that this does not need the notability tag on the page. I’m leaving this as an open discussion so other editors can decide whether or not they think the tag is needed, and if it is agreed, thentge tag shall be removed. Jerry Steinfield (talk) 06:27, 20 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Per a discussion on the nominator's page, you're not the only person confused by the addition of this tag. I am going to remove the tag since there are several reliable sources. You could make an argument too much of the article is relying on non-independent sources, but that's an entirely different matter. As a side matter, the size of the city and the budget does not determine notability directly. If you need to make an argument for the notability of a subject, you'll probably get the most people to agree with you if you reference the WP:GNG, which are ultimately what matter most. --Cerebral726 (talk) 13:13, 20 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The relevant guideline is WP:ORG: "A company, corporation, organization, group, product, or service is notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject." "Secondary" excludes the citations on the city of Tulsa's own web page. I doubt that the remaining citations constitute significant coverage: most are announcements about new chiefs, retiring chiefs, and grants, which are trivial coverage under WP:ORGDEPTH. I also doubt that they are truly independent: local news will often unthinkingly repeat whatever press releases are given to them, which WP:ORGIND calls "churnalism" and states does not count towards notability.

It is entirely possible that the Tulsa Fire Department is in fact notable, but I don't get that from the citations used on this page. Responding to the Oklahoma City bombing seems notable, but that part's not cited. Wide sections have no citations at all, and there are other issues: the organization of the history section gives undue weight to fire chiefs who were not historically significant, and much of the content is Wikipedia:Run-of-the-mill. What's unique about the Tulsa Fire Department compared to every other fire department in the country? Much like WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES, pages like this one are often better being condensed to what's truly notable, and then merged into a section on the city or town's page. @Cerebral726: you nominated this article for deletion once, so clearly we both looked at this page and said "yikes". -Apocheir (talk) 22:50, 21 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]