User talk:AlistairBooya

AXB Enterprises
I have added a "" template to the article AXB Enterprises, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may contest the proposed deletion by removing the  notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. Sl g randson (page - messages - contribs) 21:41, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

File source and copyright licensing problem with File:Hannuk obit.jpg
Thanks for uploading File:Hannuk obit.jpg. I noticed that the file's description page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is unclear. If you did not create this file yourself, you will need to specify the owner of the copyright. If you obtained it from a website, then a link to the website from which it was taken, together with a restatement of that website's terms of use of its content, is usually sufficient information. However, if the copyright holder is different from the website's publisher, their copyright should also be acknowledged.

As well as adding the source, we also need to know the terms of the license that the copyright holder has published the file under, usually done by adding a licensing tag. If you created/took the picture, audio, or video then the GFDL-self tag can be used to release it under the GFDL. If you believe the media meets the criteria at Non-free content, use a tag such as or one of the other tags listed at Image copyright tags. See Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their source and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link. Unsourced and untagged files may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If the file is copyrighted under a non-free license (per Fair use) then the file will be deleted 48 hours after 04:05, 12 February 2010 (UTC). If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Salavat (talk) 04:05, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Miss Grays Harbor


The article Miss Grays Harbor has been proposed for deletion&#32; because of the following concern:
 * Lack of notability (see comments on the talk page)

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the  notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing  will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Other than the template, welcome to Wikipedia. I saw your comment on Pageant Central, this seems a rather harsh way to have to get the message across to you but as I'm banned from posting there I'll have to do it here. Unfortunately creating articles to create buzz for your locals is specifically in contravention of Wikipedia's inclusion policies. Further your pageant has not garnered enough news attention to fulfull the notability criteria. I hate having to do this to you as I can see you put a lot of work into the article, but If I don't someone else will soon enough and they might not take pains to be polite ;) Please contact me if you have any queries with this by leaving me a message on my talk page. PageantUpdater  talk • contribs  12:46, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Miss Grays Harbor
An article that you have been involved in editing, Miss Grays Harbor, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Articles for deletion/. Thank you.Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. PageantUpdater talk • contribs  23:39, 13 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I appreciate all the work you've put in and please don't consider this a step backwards. I just think the best way to prove notability is to open it up for community debate, if it gets kept it is much more likely to stay around in the long term. PageantUpdater  talk • contribs  23:39, 13 February 2010 (UTC)


 * By nominating the article for deletion I have taken a step back from the decision and opened it to community discussion. If you would like to put across your point I recommend you post at the Articles for deletion page where others can see and consider your point of view, rather than my talk page.  Cheers.  PageantUpdater  talk • contribs  23:52, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Replaceable fair use File:Hannuk_obit.jpg
Thanks for uploading File:Hannuk_obit.jpg. I noticed the description page specifies that the media is being used under a claim of fair use, but its use in Wikipedia articles fails our first non-free content criterion in that it illustrates a subject for which a freely licensed media could reasonably be found or created that provides substantially the same information. If you believe this media is not replaceable, please:


 * 1) Go to the media description page and edit it to add, without deleting the original replaceable fair use template.
 * 2) On the image discussion page, write the reason why this image is not replaceable at all.

Alternatively, you can also choose to replace this non-free media by finding freely licensed media of the same subject, requesting that the copyright holder release this (or similar) media under a free license, or by taking a picture of it yourself.

If you have uploaded other non-free media, consider checking that you have specified how these images fully satisfy our non-free content criteria. You can find a list of description pages you have edited by clicking on this link. Note that even if you follow steps 1 and 2 above, non-free media which could be replaced by freely licensed alternatives will be deleted 2 days after this notification (7 days if uploaded before 13 July 2006), per our non-free content policy. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Melesse (talk) 10:35, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

I have contacted other Wikipedians
Just to make you aware that I have contacted the following users and asked them to comment on the AFD: User talk:Jayjg‎, User talk:Alison‎, User talk:Wikipeterproject‎, User talk:NuclearWarfare‎‎ & User talk:MelanieN‎. I have had no prior contact with any of them, they were selected randomly as administrators and/or regular Articles for Deletion commenters. You are more than welcome to do the same. PageantUpdater talk • contribs  06:04, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Your request for editor assistance
Hello AlistairBooya. I am here as a result of seeing your request for assistance at Editor assistance/Requests. I had never before even heard of Miss Grays Harbor, nor even of Grays Harbor, so I had no preconceptions about it. I have now had a look at the article Miss Grays Harbor, at its articles for deletion discussion, and at various other pages, both on and off Wikipedia. I shall tell you my conclusions. I hope my remarks will be of help to you in clarifying the way that Wikipedia deals with such cases.

You expressed doubt as to how deletion discussions work, and how they are decided. Normally such a discussion is kept open for a week, though it is possible to either close it sooner or to extend it for longer if there are special reasons for doing so. During that time any Wikipedia editor is welcome to express opinions. At the end of the time a Wikipedia administrator considers the reasons given, and decides whether there is consensus for deletion: if not then the article is not deleted. In considering the reasons given the administrator considers the value and strength of the arguments used, not a count of the number of opinions for and against. An administrator will also consider whether views expressed are in line with Wikipedia policies and guidelines: anything not relating to policy is likely to be ignored. For this reason it is important to have an understanding of the basic ideas in the relevant guidelines, and so I shall attempt to outline the most relevant points from them. You are, of course, welcome to read the guidelines themselves if you want further details.

I don't know whether you have looked at the Wikipedia notability guidelines, but the essential point is that to have an article a topic must have received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. This, of course, raises the question as to what constitutes "significant" coverage, what are "reliable" sources", and so on. There are extensive guidelines on each of these issues, but there is still room for discussion of how these issues apply in individual cases, which is why we have deletion discussions. I will say a little about how these issues seem to me to relate to this particular case in a minute, but first I will try to clarify a few other points concerning things you have written about this case.
 * 1) People who are new to Wikipedia very often do not, at first, appreciate the nature of our notability criteria, and argue instead on the basis of reasons which are not relevant. For example, one of the common arguments put forward by relative newcomers is "this is important, and everyone should know about it, so Wikipedia ought to have an article to publicise it". This is, unfortunately, out of line with several Wikipedia policies. It is a clear policy of Wikipedia that it does not provide a publicity service: in fact attempting to use Wikipedia for promotion of something is itself grounds for deletion. This is relevant in this case because, in the AfD discussion, you wrote "I hope to continue populating the regional pageant information as to garner more interest for these scholarship programs". Arguments like that will probably be completely ignored by the administrator who closes the discussion.
 * 2) You have also written "no reasonable complaint has been made towards this articles deletion beyond deeply concise Google searches aimed toward specific news organizations and meant to exclude results". Unfortunately I am not entirely sure what you mean by that, but I guess you are referring to such comments as "Remove "wiki" "facebook" "twitter" "myspace" and "hydroplane" from your google search and you'll be left with about 150 results". The point here is that another common mistake made by newcomers to Wikipedia is that getting a large number of Google hits is an indication of notability. However, this is not so, for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is related to Wikipedia's guidelines on reliable sources. There are very good reasons why we do not accept certain types of sources as establishing notability. Wikipedia articles, for example, are not accepted, because anyone at all can come in and edit them, so they are not reliable. (This is not an academic point: Wikipedia unfortunately contains large amounts of misinformation, mostly put there through ignorance, some of it maliciously. I have even seen discussions on off-wiki forums where people have discussed deliberately putting information into articles so that they can be cited in other Wikipedia articles.) For exactly the same reason facebook, twitter, myspace, etc are not reliable sources. This is the reason for excluding these pages from Wikipedia sources, not some wicked intention to exclude relevant information.
 * 3) Another reason that number of Google hits is useless as a measure of notability is that a Google search for a particular topic will produce hits for pages that briefly mention the topic in passing, and even pages that do not mention the topic at all, but happen to use the same sequence of words. This could happen, for example, if one sentence ended "...it could be either a hit or a miss", and the next sentence started "Grays Harbor is the town where...". Whether this sort of thing happens in this case I do not know, but I have known cases in the past where the substantial majority of hits claimed were for spurious hits such as that. Then there is the fact that Google hits often count numerous different copies of the same page. This certainly has happened in the Miss Grays Harbor case: for example the Google news search that you mentioned gives 23 hits. Among these 5 are all to copies of one article: verbatim copies, even all containing the same misprint. For these and other reasons it is a mistake to think that number of Google hits is a measure of notability. Certainly a Google search is a good way to start looking for evidence of notability, but when you have made the search it is essential to then critically evaluate the results: simply saying that there are thousands of hits is not enough.
 * 4) You have made comparisons with other articles. Unfortunately it is never useful to say "such and such an article exists and is no better than this one, so this one should exist too", for two reasons. Firstly, there may be considerations that you haven't noticed which make the other article more notable: for example, maybe its sources are more reliable. Secondly, it may well be that the other article should not exist, but so far nobody has noticed it. I have, in fact, known people to mention another article in this way in a deletion discussion, and found that the result of bringing attention to the other article is that it is deleted too.

Having explained a few of the reasons why some of the arguments you have used, while perfectly intelligent and reasonable, do not, in fact, contribute to establishing notability under Wikipedia's criteria, I shall move on to considering how the evidence given actually relates to notability. Looking at all the sources cited, and also at all the articles found by the Google news search, I find that the amount of coverage varies considerably. Some are articles about other competitions, in which Miss Grays Harbor receives only a passing mention: for example, a mention that Miss Grays Harbor was a runner up. By no stretch of the imagination can this be regarded as "significant coverage". In other cases we have a short article about the Miss Grays Harbor contest in local news coverage. This is much better than passing mentions in articles about other topics. However, not everything that gets mentioned in a local newspaper is worth an encyclopedia article. I once lived in a place where the local newspaper regularly used to devote several pages to people living locally who had just got married, complete with photographs of the happy couples, but we do not have a Wikipedia article on every couple who gets married. Of course the Miss Grays Harbor pageant is not at the same level of obscurity as an ordinary couple who have just got married, but I am just trying to illustrate the point that not everything that receives local news coverage is notable, and the character of the coverage has to be considered.

I hope this has been of some help to you. Please feel very welcome to ask any further questions: I shall watch this talk page. JamesBWatson (talk) 09:24, 17 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you James, that was very informative. I understand that Wikipedia standards are put in place in order to maintain a level of conformity throughout the Project. I hope that my attempts at preventing the deletion of this article hasn't put anyone including myself in a negative light, and can only hope that this may be accepted as a "...apply in individual cases..." and it can continue to be populated with information, not in order to advertise as my previous quote seemed to insinuate. I hope provide a source of information within Wikipedia to be used as an example to other programs of this size. Thank you for your comments. AlistairBooya (talk) 18:24, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

File permission problem with File:Jeffburlingame.jpg
Thanks for uploading File:Jeffburlingame.jpg. I noticed that while you provided a valid copyright licensing tag, there is no proof that the creator of the file agreed to license it under the given license.

If you created this media entirely yourself but have previously published it elsewhere (especially online), please either
 * make a note permitting reuse under the CC-BY-SA or another acceptable free license (see this list) at the site of the original publication; or
 * Send an email from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-en@wikimedia.org, stating your ownership of the material and your intention to publish it under a free license. You can find a sample permission letter here. If you take this step, add OTRS pending to the file description page to prevent premature deletion.

If you did not create it entirely yourself, please ask the person who created the file to take one of the two steps listed above, or if the owner of the file has already given their permission to you via email, please forward that email to permissions-en@wikimedia.org.

If you believe the media meets the criteria at Non-free content, use a tag such as non-free fair use or one of the other tags listed at File copyright tags, and add a rationale justifying the file's use on the article or articles where it is included. See File copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have provided evidence that their copyright owners have agreed to license their works under the tags you supplied, too. You can find a list of files you have created in [ your upload log]. Files lacking evidence of permission may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. You may wish to read the Wikipedia's image use policy. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 22:35, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

File permission problem with File:Jeffburlingame.JPG
Thanks for uploading File:Jeffburlingame.JPG. I noticed that while you provided a valid copyright licensing tag, there is no proof that the creator of the file has agreed to release it under the given license.

If you created this media entirely yourself but have previously published it elsewhere (especially online), please either
 * make a note permitting reuse under the CC-BY-SA or another acceptable free license (see this list) at the site of the original publication; or
 * Send an email from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-en@wikimedia.org, stating your ownership of the material and your intention to publish it under a free license. You can find a sample permission letter here. If you take this step, add OTRS pending to the file description page to prevent premature deletion.

If you did not create it entirely yourself, please ask the person who created the file to take one of the two steps listed above, or if the owner of the file has already given their permission to you via email, please forward that email to permissions-en@wikimedia.org.

If you believe the media meets the criteria at Non-free content, use a tag such as non-free fair use or one of the other tags listed at File copyright tags, and add a rationale justifying the file's use on the article or articles where it is included. See File copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have provided evidence that their copyright owners have agreed to license their works under the tags you supplied, too. You can find a list of files you have created in [ your upload log]. Files lacking evidence of permission may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. You may wish to read the Wikipedia's image use policy. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:40, 15 March 2013 (UTC)