User talk:Deathspawner

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Andrew Allen
Firstly, just being a musician does not automatically make somebody notable enough to be included in Wikipedia; what we require is properly sourced evidence that they actually meet our notability criteria for musicians. It's not even enough to claim that they meet those criteria, if proper sources which verify the fact can't be found — and the article did not cite a single valid media source, but was sourced exclusively to Allen's own social media profiles and his own press kit, and an artist's own marketing materials do not count as reliable sources.

I'm a Canadian music geek, so it's highly unlikely that a Canadian artist could have had a real Top 40 hit in Canada without my ever having heard of them — but since "highly unlikely" is not the same thing as "flatly impossible", I set that fact aside and did a thorough Google search, which failed to turn up even one single valid source for the claim that either of his singles ever actually made a national chart. His name doesn't appear in any searchable archive of Canadian chart hits, and I can't find even one news article in real media which talks about him or his "hit" singles — the claim simply is not verifiable in a single legitimate source. For what it's worth, the original version of the article that was deleted by somebody else in 2008 claimed that he had hits on a single radio station in his own hometown — and given the complete unverifiability of the newer "hits", I strongly suspect that's where they charted too — but to be considered a notable hit single by our rules on here, a song has to chart on an IFPI-certified national chart, not a single radio station in a single media market. Mind you, having a hit single isn't the only criterion by which an artist can be notable enough for our purposes, as we have a good many articles about musicians who've never had a conventional "hit" at all, but every one of those other criteria still has to be properly sourced to real media references.

As for the timing of the most recent single, it wasn't just a simple typo; the article, as written, flatly stated more than once that it "will be released later in 2011". So it may have been just a mistake, but given the lack of (yep, I'm going to say it again) reliable sources, it wasn't possible to determine which of the two conflicting claims was the erroneous one.

None of which, of course, means that Andrew Allen can never have an article; our notability rules are fundamentally about the quality of the article, not a judgement on his talent or his worth as a person. If you know where some real sources can be located, then by all means bring them to our attention so that we can restore and improve the article properly — but without some real sources, that particular version of the article is not entitled to stick around just because Andrew Allen exists.

And incidentally, the article's creator, User:Nathan Williams, has a longstanding history of being a problematic editor on here — he actually used to create outright hoax articles on a regular basis, and while he's stopped doing that, he still frequently posts unsourceable or demonstrably incorrect claims about real topics. So, unfortunately, he just ain't entitled to very much benefit of the doubt. Bearcat (talk) 06:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Nathan Williams
I agree with everything said in that last paragraph, and to be completely truthful, I was an idiot when I created those pages. I was 15 or 16 years old and had a sick fascination with Radio at the time, and while I still love it, I've grown up since then, and I'd like to think the quality of my articles has improved. Everything I edit or create is made with good information, not my imagination.

As regards to Andrew Allen, I don't understand how such references as AOL Music, VEVO and iTunes aren't considered to be reliable. He has even been included in this highly popular compilation Now That's What I Call Music!. I will re-create this article with more references, because I believe (though I don't know the rules of Wikipedia to the greatest extent) that it's my right to "Try Try Again". --Nathan Williams (talk) 23:52, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Because none of those sites constitute media coverage of him in reliable sources — any artist at all, whether he's got encyclopedic notability or not, can put up a profile on iTunes if he's selling his music on there; the AOL page is literally just a straight repaste of his own self-penned biographical profile from his own press kit; and VEVO is just a video streaming site. Proper referencing on Wikipedia is a question of having gotten real coverage in real media sources that are independent of the subject (newspapers or magazines writing articles about him, radio or TV coverage, etc.), not simply a question of being able to demonstrate that he exists. And yes, of course you have a right to try again if you can add better sources which make his encyclopedic notability more apparent — that's always true of any topic that's been deleted, because deletion is a comment on the quality of the article, not on the person himself. Bearcat (talk) 01:04, 22 July 2011 (UTC)