Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alfredo Villanueva Collado


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. An unusual situation here, with a string of "deletes" following the relisting; prior to this the debate appeared to be trending clearly towards "keep". Going by numbers, it would appear that the 6k-7d situation might be "no consensus", but there are some serious issues of verifiability, and the lack of citations, which have not been adequately addressed by those supporting keeping.

The article contains a large list of references, but connections between the content and the source material is not present, nor has the reliability of these sources been fully examined. I looked at the Google Books links mentioned by Phil Bridger, and while it is true that some of these books cite Villanueva Collado's work, they do not describe Villanueva Collado the person. Many other sources appear to be books which Villanueva Collado has written, again not material about him.

Due to this article being a biography of a living person, fixing matters related to verifiability of the content are more urgent than with other articles. With no movement to fix the problems listed in the past week, the outcome must be to delete the article for not adequately meeting the strict policies which govern such articles.

I will also mention that the article appears very similar in structure to the counterpart at the Spanish Wikipedia es:Alfredo Villanueva Collado, the original versions are probably a translation of that material. People who want to write up something better may want to look at that article for inspiration, but keep in mind that the English Wikipedia's demands for proper sourcing of the content are generally practiced in a more restrictive (even draconian) manner than on other Wikipedias. Note that the decision here is not due to the source material being in Spanish, discussions have repeatedly, recently, and overwhelmingly rejected proposals that sources must be in English to pass verifiability and notability requirements. The problem is that the references listed have not been tied adequately to the content in the article. On the other hand, nothing in the article is by any means defamatory, and I am willing to provide the content upon request if someone wants to work on fixing the concerns listed. Sjakkalle (Check!)  09:21, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Alfredo Villanueva Collado

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Unregistered user requesting assistance in deletion process. Entry does not seem to fit Wikipedia's notability guidelines for academics. Further, a look at the page's history gives a strong suggestion that the page was actually started by the subject of the entry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.119.21.130 (talk) 21:32, 20 October 2009 (UTC)  GB fan  talk 21:47, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - I don't have access to the references cited, but basing on the list of references, there appears to be significant coverage in multiple sources. Unless someone confirms the sources are not reliable or adequate must assume they are reliable and verify the information in the article.   GB fan  talk 22:02, 20 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Please note that the entire biography is also completely unsourced.65.119.21.130 (talk) 22:24, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment The article is sourced, there are no inline citations but there are many references. Inline citations are preferred, but there is no requirement for inline citations.  GB fan  talk 00:03, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Unless someone confirms the sources are not reliable or fake all up.. -Snorre/Antwelm (talk) 23:18, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics-related deletion discussions. Thryduulf (talk) 13:56, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. The Google Books search linked above leads to plenty of coverage in reliable sources. The subject's main notability appears to be as a poet rather than as an academic. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:19, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. If the consensus from those with more experience is that he's notable enough for the article to remain, perhaps it would be appropriate to suggest that they work to eliminate what appears to be some conflict of interests in parts of his bio. It seems pretty clear he wrote it himself, leading to some likely unprovable claims like the reason why he was fired from a college position and the reason why an article he wrote wasn't published. It could stand to be a bit more neutrally presented.65.119.21.130 (talk) 19:16, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. GS gives cites of 6, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1. That's all. To pass WP:Prof #1 many hundreds of cites are usually required so it seems that notability is not achieved here or in any other categories of WP:Prof. Article may pass on much weaker standards of WP:Author but it has to be demonstrated. However, searching GB on 'author:"Alfredo Villanueva Collado"' gives fifteen hits. For notability it is not how much is published but how much it is noted. Input from Hispanic scholars and poets about reviews, awards etc. will be valuable. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:31, 23 October 2009 (UTC).
 * there is no cutoff figure, and hundreds are not normally required. It depends on the subject, the time period, and the distribution of cites. notability is not   a numerical function of GS cites, though they can be when carefully interpreted very valuable information in judging.  He's in the humanities, and such counts are almost worthless there. Further, he write is publications that by and large GS does not cover--there is an extremely strong English language bias. not that this shows he;s notable, just that GS counts are not by themselves a valid argument.    DGG ( talk ) 23:20, 27 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment. There are more references than there is information. They've also been cut and pasted from something else, as some of them have a succession of numbers in brackets. The whole thing looks suspect. Lara  13:45, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. Searching for the full name, i.e. including his two last names, on Google Books may miss some results. In Spanish-speaking countries the second last name usually carries less weight, and is sometimes not used at all. I did a search for "Alfredo Villanueva". The problem is that the name is not uncommon. However, I was able to find this English-language review. I'm not an expert on the topic, so I'm unable to make a judgment on notability. As a final comment, the Spanish-language hits that show up in a Google Book search seem to be of three kinds (content-wise): 1. Poems or other literature written by Villanueva, 2. Critical writings by Villanueva on others, 3. Critical writings on Villanueva by others. From the hits I looked at (consider that I did not do an exhaustive analysis) only a minority belonged to the last category. For those belonging to this last category, unfortunately snippets were usually unavailable. --CronopioFlotante (talk) 20:32, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * It's the third category that is important for notability. Would you be able to give numbers? Xxanthippe (talk) 08:42, 24 October 2009 (UTC).
 * After looking at all the hits that result from this search the count is the following. There are 74 non-repeated hits. Of those, 13 are on other people, so that leaves 61. Of those, 12 are publicity for a collection (such as this one). Of the 49 left, I counted 4 as belonging to the third category. The title of one more book suggests that it may fall in this category as well, but I wasn't able to find the reference to Villanueva. CronopioFlotante (talk) 12:09, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
 * My review of the Google Books hits found at least these five which appear to fall into category 3 and provide more than passing mentions:,,(an 18-page essay with the subject's name as its title), and . Google Books also tells us that the subject is mentioned in The Oxford encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, but there is no preview available. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:39, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't think all of them are in the third category. Link 1 seems to be on work of Villanueva Collado on José Asunción Silva as a critic and link 4 also mentions Villanueva Collado in a role corresponding to category 2 above. Note: my search above included only items for which previews are available. CronopioFlotante (talk) 13:13, 24 October 2009 (UTC).

 Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, NW ( Talk ) 20:44, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Poetry-related deletion discussions.  —CronopioFlotante (talk) 12:28, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep And clean-up. Lots of sources but their relativity is unclear. By any measure this person seems to be an accomplished poet but having some bilingual poets help show the notability would be helpful. -- Banj e  b oi   21:23, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Plenty of references for this person, proving their notability.  D r e a m Focus  14:21, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
 * Relisting because there seems to be a good deal of disagreement about the sources; another week of discussion might help that out. NW ( Talk ) 20:45, 27 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep. No BLP conflict. Sufficiently notable. > RUL3R >trolling >vandalism  21:42, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. I act as devil's advocate and vote delete, although I am prepared to change my mind on presentation of better evidence. The subject clearly fails WP:Prof and has to be assessed on the weaker standards of WP:Author. One editor says that the subject is an accomplished poet. I am not able to dispute this as I have only a limited knowledge of modern poetry and of Spanish. However the issue for an AfD is not whether the subject is accomplished but whether the subject is notable, specifically whether the subject has been noted. The deep digging of CronopioFlotante and others has bought up very little material and some of that is of doubtful import. An argument has been put by others that because of the distance of the area that the subject operates in from the knowledge of many contributors to the AfD pages of the English Wiki, sources will be hard to come by. The article has been at AfD for more than a week and if good sources exist they should have emerged by now. Notability should not be determined on the basis of sources that are assumed to exist but which cannot actually be produced. The supporting evidence at present relies on a handful of sources of mostly marginal validity. For a research scholar, three or four hundred independent sources from the mainstream literature would not necessarily guarantee a pass at WP:Prof so it seems to me that, by accepting this subject as notable, the standards of WP:Author are being set too low. Finally, if the article is kept it should be pruned down to a few lines as its present form is too overblown and indulgent. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:20, 29 October 2009 (UTC).
 * Delete. "Notability should not be determined on the basis of sources that are assumed to exist but which cannot actually be produced" – this is a fundamentally important point made by Xxanthippe. I note that a very similar situation existed in another very recent AfD, i.e. several proponents repeatedly promised reliable, convincing sources, but never delivered. This sort of problem is a deal-breaker. (That article was deleted.) Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 22:27, 30 October 2009 (UTC).
 * Delete. I had refused to !vote before because of my limited knowledge of the topic but Xxanthippe and Agricola44's reasoning makes sense. Notability requires verifiable evidence. I would change the !vote to keep if the evidence surfaced. CronopioFlotante (talk) 09:15, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Second the above sentiment. Eusebeus (talk) 18:53, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. After all this time at AfD this is still a mass of unsourced and unsourceable details. There are a few inline citations, supposedly sourcing the publication of his poetry collections, but the quality of the sources is very poor (many not reliable, not about him, etc) so I have no confidence that the many non-online references listed are any better. Fails WP:V and WP:BLP. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:16, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * To be fair eleven days is not a lot of time. Given that an interpretation is needed to suss out what sources say what, which are more RS than others for which info etc. I personally don't expect overnight results. -- Banj e  b oi   02:54, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete in the absence of reliable sources independent of the subject that discuss the subject of this BLP in the depth required for an encyclopedia article to the extent that they would help establish notability and allow for independent verification of its claims.Bali ultimate (talk) 15:00, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.