Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Betty Thompson


 * 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 keep. Kurykh (talk) 04:29, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Betty Thompson

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Delete. Biography of a television personality, written more like a résumé than an encyclopedia article and entirely unsourced but for a clutch of primary source external links. While there's definitely a valid potential notability claim here as the original host of the Canadian version of Romper Room, what we don't have is the reliable sourcing necessary to properly support an article about her as a standalone topic — I have searched every database of historical Canadian media coverage that I have access to, but all I can find is a handful of glancing namechecks of her existence in articles that are about the show, with nothing that constitutes substantive coverage about her. So while she can certainly be mentioned in the Canada section of our article about Romper Room, the quality of sourcing simply isn't there for her to get a standalone biography separately from that. Bearcat (talk) 16:54, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 16:54, 23 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Merge the verifiable parts of the article into the Romper Room article, per the nominator's rationale and my own search results. It's unfortunate, but there's no Significant Coverage in Reliable, Independent Sources that is required by the General Notability Guideline to support a stand-alone article. Exemplo347 (talk) 16:59, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep - Changed !vote due to new sources. Exemplo347 (talk) 01:07, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Television-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:44, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 02:21, 26 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep - looking at the External Links in the article, there is one secondary source. That is a clipping from the April 11, 1994 Kitchener Record, detailing her history. One of the problems with tackling older articles like this, is that really, it's difficult to do without accessing newspapers from the time period. There's also a Kitchener Post article from 2012 that briefly summarizes her life. Nfitz (talk) 04:10, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
 * The Kitchener Post is a community weekly newspaper in her own hometown, not a regionally-distributed daily newspaper — so it would be a valid source for supplementary confirmation of stray facts after she had already cleared WP:GNG on stronger sources, but it counts for exactly nothing toward the basic matter of passing GNG in the first place. If community weeklies like the Kitchener Post counted toward GNG in and of themselves, we would have to start keeping articles about presidents of church bake sale committees and parent-teacher associations and condo boards because GNG had been met by the Kitchener Post coverage itself.
 * And while The Record does count for more than the Post does, we still need more than just one GNG-eligible source before GNG is passed. To get an article kept on the basis of just one source, that source would have to be confirming passage of an "automatic must-keep" criterion like "won the Giller Prize" or "got elected to Parliament as an MP" — for criteria where the basic inclusion test is conditional on the subject's passage of GNG (e.g. "was a television personality"), it takes at least four or five GNG-worthy sources to pass GNG, not just one.
 * And, for the record, as I already noted in my nomination statement I did access newspapers from the time period: I have a good half a dozen Canadian newspapers (including both The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star) where I can directly access archived coverage all the way back to the 19th century, and about a dozen others where I can access coverage as far back as 1981 (when she would still have been a potential subject of "Where are they now?" coverage, since she had only just recently left Romper Room and was still alive and active in her community), without so much as leaving my apartment. And I did check them all. Bearcat (talk) 15:28, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
 * You'd have to check the Kitchener Record, not the Globe or Star; she was very well known in KW. I can only get the last 5 years or so of the Record, and she is still frequently name-checked 2 decades after her death. Nfitz (talk) 17:20, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
 * It was a national edition of Romper Room, not a one-city local one, so the Globe and the Star are entirely reasonable places to search for coverage of her. And even if it had been a one-city local edition, the coverage would still have to have escaped Kitchener-Waterloo and gotten into the Globe or the Star before she could be deemed encyclopedically notable for it — with the almost completely isolated exception of politicians who clear WP:NPOL on the role itself, people of purely local notability do not normally get into Wikipedia on the basis of purely local coverage alone, precisely because of what I said above about how we would have to start keeping presidents of church bake sale committees and PTAs and condo boards.
 * And at any rate, we don't keep inadequately sourced articles about people without "automatic inclusion" notability claims just because it's theoretically possible that improved sourcing to cover off a GNG claim might exist somewhere we don't have the ability to track down — we keep them only if and when somebody has done the work necessary to demonstrate that improved sourcing to cover off a GNG claim does exist. "Namechecked" doesn't assist notability, either: she has to be "substantively the subject" of enough sources to clear GNG, not just "namechecked" in coverage of other related or tangential subjects. Bearcat (talk) 19:44, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I've added some references to the article. Some meet WP:GNG. It's a bit sparse before 1990, as I'm afraid I can't access southwestern Ontario publications before that date. Nfitz (talk) 23:57, 26 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Comment - was inclined to let this one go, given that tracking down sources such as the K-W Record or other print publications of the era which would almost certainly have significant coverage, but is difficult to research, but would help establish at least notability on the regional scale. Also haven't had a chance to track down A History of Children's Television in English Canada, 1952-1986 to see what that might mention for Romper Room. However, thanks to for all the work on tracking down additional references. Dl2000 (talk) 04:08, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
 * do you think with the (now) 23 references I've added since the AFD started, that it achieves WP:GNG? Nfitz (talk) 17:24, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
 * There now seem to be sufficient numerous and stronger independent refs albeit mostly regional. However, WP:GNG doesn't seem to require a geographic magnitude, just the sufficient presence of secondary sourcing. Dl2000 (talk) 04:59, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
 * GNG does require coverage outside of a local area though. Due to the nature of local sources, they will obviously print more information about local events and community members. (I remember an AFD where someone pointed to coverage such as "Ms. X wins Pecan pie bake off"). Unless the subject has received coverage over a wider area, I wouldn't consider it as having satisfied GNG. --Lemongirl942 (talk) 05:52, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The geographic range of coverage does come into play if you're going for "passes GNG because media coverage exists" rather than "passes a specific notability criterion". By the very nature of politics, for example, the vast majority of federal MPs are always going to get the bulk of their coverage in their local media rather than consistently getting nationalized coverage — but because MPs are deemed to pass WP:NPOL, the geographic range of where their coverage is coming from doesn't actually matter. But the geographic range does matter if you're going for "GNG passed because media coverage exists" on an article that has no automatic must-keep claim under any of the SNGs — as I've often had to point out in AFD discussions (and already did earlier in this discussion, as well), if all we required for GNG was that media coverage exists, and there were no geographic range requirements on where that coverage had to be found, then we would have to start keeping articles about presidents of church bake sale committees, elementary school parent-teacher associations, condominium boards, non-winning candidates for county dogcatcher, high school and junior league athletes, the woman who lives a mile down the road from my parents who woke up one morning to find a pig in her front yard, and me. So yes, the geographic range of the coverage is relevant to the question of whether GNG is passed or not. Bearcat (talk) 16:39, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: Further comments should address the sources that have been added.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  J 947  18:37, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Ignoring the interesting question of what you were doing with the pig, that would be BLP1E - though I can see for the person in charge of the church bake sale it would accumulate. Though there's a difference between Mayberry, and a major daily newspaper that that covers an urban area of over half-a-million. There are numerous significant articles about here in the Record, and it continues over 20 years after her death. Not to mention mentions in papers from Toronto to Windsor - an area bigger than most countries. And there's also the source that meets GNG from the Waterloo library website. When I was researching, there were allusions to a 30-minute TV special after she died, but I didn't pursue that. Perhaps I should try and track it down and see if it actually happened. Nfitz (talk) 00:48, 6 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep The article had problems when it was nominated - minimal sourcing, uncertain notability. Those problems have been pretty well solved by the addition of many secondary sources. It is now clear that her influence and notability were enduring and went beyond local. Kudos to User:Nfitz for the rescue. --MelanieN (talk) 01:23, 10 March 2017 (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.