Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dakota Mills


 * 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__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. NFOOTY has been deprecated: notability in this case must rest on GNG once ROUTINE coverage has been excluded. Several sources have been presented here that could constitute SIGCOV, but I find the challenges to these sources convincing; specifically, that most of them constitute routine coverage in local newspapers, while the remainder are not substantive. When such challenges have been put forward, further arguments in favor of keeping per the sources found with no further detail do not strengthen the case to keep. I would also remind everybody that a specific AfD is not the place to relitigate NFOOTY, or the place to debate the proportion of women's biographies on Wikipedia. Vanamonde (Talk) 21:59, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Dakota Mills

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

American former college soccer player who earned at least one cap with the Saint Kitts and Nevis women's national football team. Lots of mentions from her college career, but a lot of them come from university athletics department press releases. Unable to find sufficient in-depth coverage of the subject from third-party sources, failing WP:GNG. I am not at all against draftifying due to her college accomplishments, if anything. JTtheOG (talk) 18:09, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Sportspeople, Women, Football, Caribbean,  and New Jersey. JTtheOG (talk) 18:09, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in WikiProject Football's list of association football-related deletions. Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 22:13, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete - no evidence of notability. If sources are found please ping me. GiantSnowman 09:16, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep per sources below which show notability. GiantSnowman 09:43, 23 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Keep per WP:GNG and WP:HEY. Article now cites significant coverage in multiple secondary sources, from each period in her career as a player. Her high school soccer career is covered in this 2014 NJ.com newspaper feature article, "Dakota Mills of Hightstown is The Times of Trenton Girls Soccer Player of the Year for 2014". During her college soccer career, she was covered in newspaper articles such as this 2015 The Trentonian article, "Former Hightstown High star Dakota Mills makes immediate impact at St. Joe’s", and was featured as a Philadelphia Daily News "Athlete of the Week" on at least three occasions: July 2016, August 2016, and October 2016. Finally, as an international player, her strong performance despite Saint Kitts & Nevis's 11–0 loss to Canada is described in this 2020 article in SB Nation Was well worth fixing this article. Pinging . Cielquiparle (talk) 04:08, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Update: Per comment below, have removed the SB Nation post by Charles Olney, editor in chief of Backline Soccer, as a source from the article, but there is still enough focused coverage to satisfy WP:GNG. Cielquiparle (talk) 03:47, 25 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Delete Fails GNG with a lack of significant coverage. Winning non notable awards doesn't make someone notable. Dougal18 (talk) 11:32, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Just so we are clear, during her college career, as stated in the article (and as recognized in the original nomination for deletion), the actual awards that matter include: Offensive Player of the Year awards in the Atlantic 10 Conference and the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) (2016); she was also included in the 2016 and 2018 Atlantic 10 All-Championship Team as well as the Atlantic All-Conference First Team, and was selected as an ECAC All-Star (2016). Cielquiparle (talk) 03:51, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete Sorry, routine local high school coverage doesn't count at all, and I don't give much weight to the local "Athletes of the week" either, that's 104 high school and college players with just 2-3 sentences of coverage every year. The final source above is also just a brief mention among a team that was half teenagers. Reywas92Talk 13:49, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
 * That NJ.com piece is an in-depth feature article focused only on her. There is nothing "routine" about that. "Athlete of the Week" in the Philadelphia Daily News wouldn't be enough on its own, I agree; but she was featured three times in the same year, and her Atlantic 10 Conference-level achievements are highlighted. This counts as recognition in a secondary source, and in any case, in aggregate including the other pieces, there is enough quality content to satisfy WP:GNG for this international football player who also had an impressive college soccer career. Cielquiparle (talk) 01:32, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Again, I do not care in the least about local coverage of high schoolers, and WP:YOUNGATH "excludes the majority of local coverage in both news sources and sports specific publications". We can't consider every local recognition for youth as contributing to notability. Say I have systemic bias, but being an "international" player for country of 50k people isn't a basis for notability either, is that even considered professional? Reywas92Talk 03:33, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete, agreed with Reywas92's assessment. High school sports coverage is almost always routine, and an un-bylined piece announcing her winning a local newspaper's "area player of the year" award is exactly the kind of coverage YOUNGATH is intended to exclude ❌. How many millions of teens receive this kind of news recognition? I think all the kids who won hefty scholarships got profiles in my local paper. We even got middle school honors student of the week pieces with the same coverage as the Philadelphia Daily News "Athletes of the Week" column (which is obviously not independent anyway as it's from nomination submissions) ❌. allforxi.com is a group blog hosted through SB Nation, so should be removed from the page as an unreliable source (this should be clear enough when clicking on the author brings you to his SB Nation user profile)❌. JoelleJay (talk) 00:07, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Charles Olney (who posted to SB Nation) is the editor in chief of Backline Soccer, but given that he's also a Professor of Political Science and his own editorial team does not appear to have published their editorial guidelines, I've removed his article as a source given that this is a BLP. Nevertheless, there is sufficient coverage per WP:GNG to justify keeping this article, between the 2014 NJ.com feature article focused on Mills, the article in The Trentonian which is focused on Mills, and the three "Athletes of the Week" pieces in Philadelphia Daily News, and WP:IDONTLIKEIT is not an appropriate reason to delete. Cielquiparle (talk) 03:47, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The athletes of the week pieces are submitted nominations, not from the newspaper's own research into area athletes. They don't count towards anything. The 2014 piece also fails YOUNGATH as a local interview (NJ.com hosts several local newspapers, including the Times of Trenton, which is also not an independent source as the award-giver) in the aggregated high school sports section. My evaluation is in line with the hundreds of other amateur athletes that get deleted, and in particular with how we treat high school coverage; see, e.g., here (sources at AfD: ~980-word profile in regional media, ~920-word profile in same outlet, 550+-word interview with commentary in a second outlet, 1000-word interview with commentary in a third outlet, 400-word interview with commentary in a fourth outlet, 180-word award announcement in a fifth outlet, among others, spanning over a year). Here's another where ~470 words covering a regional newspaper's "HS soccer player of the year" recipient, plus various transactional articles with background on his pro career, was not enough for GNG. And another, where sourcing at the time included this piece with 300+ non-quote words of background on his high school records plus this 350-word interview+commentary on his middle school achievements. Here's one with an 850+-word interview/profile on the subject's HS career, supplemented with a 430+-word profile of his college records in national news. JoelleJay (talk) 18:53, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Per WP:ATA, WP:OTHERSTUFF is not grounds for deletion, and this looks like classic bludgeoning per WP:BLUDGEON. You have made your case, now move on. Cielquiparle (talk) 20:06, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh sheesh, a single response to your response to her is not bludgeoning, you're the one who's rebutted all three delete voters. This is not an Otherstuff argument, it's showing that there's clear precedent for excluding typical coverage of amateur young athletes. Reywas92Talk 01:21, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * FWIW, it seems each of those were before the 2022 NSPORT overhaul. Prior to that we considered accomplishments much more in notability, i.e. someone with moderate sigcov that didn't pass NSPORT then would be deleted, but would likely be kept now for passing WP:GNG. BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:57, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep - I see a lot of concern about "routine high school sports coverage", but that isn't what this athlete's Notability rests on. This is a fully-capped national team footballer, who is discussed at length in this RS, and the statewide coverage here is not routine, either. Clear pass of GNG and NBASIC, and we need more articles about national team members in women's football, not fewer. Newimpartial (talk) 20:35, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Two whole sentences is not "at length", and to be clear, the second link is for The Times (Trenton), a local paper that's host. There is no longer any guideline indicating that national team players are presumed notable, and I don't think that really applied for such small countries desparate for players either. Reywas92Talk 01:30, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't see any Times (Trenton) link, and the three sentences in the former source are clearly SIGCOV. I recognize that there is no longer a formal presumption of Notability for international footballers - which I think is a mistake, and one of the effects of this mistake is precisely to disadvantage female footballers at AfD. Some editors may feel that expanding the global proportionality and the gender equity of wikipedia articles are not appropriate goals for an encyclopaedia, but I disagee with them, and this is precisely the instance where the attitudes of some editors at AfD contribute to outcomes that run counter to encyclopaedic coverage. Newimpartial (talk) 15:51, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Wow I'm so sorry I didn't count "It worked." as a sentence....no, that is absolutely not significant coverage. None of that is biographical coverage, it's a description of a single game's performance, the only one we know she was in. The other article is called "Dakota Mills of Hightstown is The Times of Trenton Girls Soccer Player of the Year for 2014", and the Times of Trenton is one of a few local papers in NJ owned by Advance Publications and hosted on NJ.com – that doesn't make it statewide coverage though. Reywas92Talk 02:17, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The All for XI source is a group blog with content submitted by contributors, not journalists, and administered by "managers" and "authors" whose names just link to their SBNation user profile. It is not RS. The NJ.com source is local high school coverage and so fails YOUNGATH. NJ.com hosts The Times (Trenton); if it were published separately then why is there no announcement of her win coming from The Times? This is the first I've seen you in a sportsperson AfD, so perhaps you are not familiar with identifying routine coverage in this context, but this is exactly the kind of material regularly rejected at AfD. Additionally, accepting such coverage as contributory to GNG would license far, far more articles on white male athletes being created than it would any other demographic, to the extent that it would decrease proportional representation of those other demographics. This can be seen from the fact that Lugnuts, who created possibly the most articles on women athletes, was also likely the greatest contributor toward lowering the %women's bios precisely because he applied the same "played professionally" threshold to both genders. And that's only considering contemporary athletes; how many millions more men received this type of coverage in the hundreds more years men played competitive sports? JoelleJay (talk) 01:14, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't know what your issue with SBnation is; some of the best journalists covering women's football may be found publishing there. And I am well aware that coverage about the player, not the game (as is offered here) has been dismissed at AfD by editors who want to reduce Wikipedia's coverage of athletes. However, it is my view that this is a tortured reading of WP:ROUTINE and runs counter to WP:GNG - the standard these editors are supposed to be applying - which is supposed to be based on, "are these reliable sources we can use to write an article?" and not, "do they demonstrate that the article's subject is somehow more important than other similar subjects?"
 * And to be clear about the equity issue, my point is specifically that when editors maintain that fully capped international footballers should not be presumed notable, they are undermining equity on wikipedia by preventing the creation and retention of articles specifically of female footballers and especially of women playing for smaller nations (such as the subject of this article).This has nothing to do with Lugnuts or with "playing professionally" - the latter not being a threshold that I support in any way. If we could agree that all international footballers are presumed notable, that would contribute far more to the retention of BLP articles for women athletes than of men, since men's national team players are much more likely to have sufficient coverage that they will not arrive at AfD or will be SNOW kept. Newimpartial (talk) 13:12, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Articles for deletion/Cosmos Munegabe is an AfD (from December 2011!) which shows that men's national team players who do not have sufficient coverage are not kept. Hundreds more have been deleted since WP:NSPORTS2022, and plenty others were deleted before it. Jogurney (talk) 16:46, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Just to make my point clear, it wasn't "no male national team footballer has ever been deleted", it was "women's national team footballers would benefit more than men from a presumption of notability, because the RS on the topic are subject to systemic and other forms of bias". Newimpartial (talk) 19:05, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree with JoelleJay on that point. If a presumption of notability existed for national team footballers (contrary to community consensus through NSPORTS2022), it would result in far more men's national team footballer articles than women's national team footballer articles. As an example, 15% of the articles in Spain's men's and women's national team footballer categories are women (133, to 757 for men). So, this presumption wouldn't increase representation of women's footballers as a percentage of total footballer biographies. Jogurney (talk) 20:00, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Re: If a presumption of notability existed for national team footballers ... t would result in far more men's national team footballer articles than women's national team footballer articles - the data you give doesn't support that statement, though. You cite the existing articles for national team footballers, which reflect the status quo where editors don't accept a presumption of notability on this basis.

Fortunately we have List of Spain international footballers and List of Spain women's international footballers, which offer reliable counts of men and women who have had 20 or more caps with each of the national teams. Based on these pages and the categories cited above, 151/151 men with 20 or more national team caps have articles, along with 58 out of 59 women with 20 or more caps. This means that, following the biases of the sources, we have 606 articles about national team men with fewer than 20 caps and only 79 articles about the equivalent. Assuming that the proportion of players with more than 20 caps is no lower for men than it is for women (and it is likely to be higher for men), that suggests that there are a minimum of 158 "missing" articles that could be created if a stronger presumption of notability were applied to national team footballers.


 * To summarize the findings of that data discussion, the case of Spain suggests that if a uniform presumption of notability were applied to national team footballers, the proportion of articles for women would increase from 15% to 28% of the relevant articles - and the proportion would be considerably higher among WP:BLPs. Newimpartial (talk) 18:09, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I see your point here, but we don't have to guess since bdfutbol.com has full lists of Spain men's and women's footballers that have been capped here and here. The men's list reports 846 while the women's list reports 233 (no numbering, so I might have miscounted slightly). So, if every single one of these footballers had an article, the women's articles would be 22% (rather than 15%) of the total. However, the 15% probably doesn't reflect the possible GNG-compliant articles but rather the level of editor interest in creating all of these 1,079 articles. Jogurney (talk) 23:33, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * To really test your theory it would help to know if any Spain men's or women's national team footballer biographies have ever been deleted or redirected (for failing GNG). I checked a batch of women with single caps, and I didn't see any redirects or deletions, but it was only a population of five. Does someone have a tool that would help us figure this out? Jogurney (talk) 23:41, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I also checked five men with single caps to see if any were deleted or redirected; none were (although one hadn't been created yet). So, without more evidence, it doesn't seem that your theory that the lack of a presumption of notability impacts the ratio of men's and women's national team footballers is supported. Jogurney (talk) 23:47, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * However, it is my view that this is a tortured reading of WP:ROUTINE and runs counter to WP:GNG - the standard these editors are supposed to be applying - which is supposed to be based on, "are these reliable sources we can use to write an article?" and not, "do they demonstrate that the article's subject is somehow more important than other similar subjects?" Notability guidelines do not override the policy against routine coverage counting toward notability. Our prohibition against routine news is in fact a critical component of ensuring articles are not made on every high school gridiron coach or municipal employee or society leader who happens to live in a town with two newspapers. Recognizing what is routine in a particular field takes some time to figure out; I would recommend doing what I did before I started !voting and spending a few days reading the most recent 100+ athlete AfDs that generated 10kb+ discussions as well as browsing through all of the NSPORT talk archives.
 * "Playing internationally" is no better a threshold than "professional". How many years were men playing on the national teams of various sports before even amateur, domestic women's leagues existed? We had a very strong consensus that no sporting achievement presumes notability; it only offers a rebuttable prediction that GNG sourcing exists, provided that at least one piece of GNG-contributing coverage has been identified. That is not the case here. JoelleJay (talk) 00:12, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what the italics for policy are referring to here: WP:ROUTINE is a part of the guideline WP:NEVENTS, and the reference to "routine coverage" ar WP:N is a precis of the event guideline. As far as I can tell, the guideline text warning against "routine coverage" was intended to ensure that we don't have an article on each game covered in two or more reasonably detailed news reports; it was not intended to say that nothing in a report of a game can contribute to the Notability of players or of teams - which is why I referred to the latter reading of ROUTINE as tortured.
 * As far as the rebuttable prediction of GNG sourcing is concerned, I am saying two things: (1) I think a stronger presumption for international footballers, rather than an easily rebuttable one, would produce more balanced and equitable Notability decisions and (2) the pincer movement by which presumptions are weakened or eliminated and at the same time sourcing requirements are ratcheted up seems designed to produce what I think I'll write an essay defining as "walled deserts" - areas where editors deliberately starve a domain (in this case, women's athletics) of coverage, based on some prior conviction that it isn't a "worthy" subject for an encyclopaedia. (Witness this IP, whose only activity on wiki has been the proposed deletion of 100 articles on female footballers.)

It seems to me that group of editors have decided that a certain group of potential biographical subjects, namely athletes, are less deserving of inclusion in an encyclopaedia than the sources support. These editors have twisted ROUTINE - which is supposed to be an exclusion of announcements similar in kind to the exclusion of press release content and of stories of extremely local stories, and the scope of which is limited to "events" - into a bar used to exclude world-wide coverage of the roles individuals play in highly visible global events, which I'm sure was never intended by the writers of ROUTINE. The same group of editors also attempts to exclude respected outlets publishing the work of professional journalists as "blogs" - seemingly confusing SPS with a particular publishing technology - from being considered reliable sources, and also bizarrely denies that the achievement-based criteria in ANYBIO should apply to athletes even at the same time that they argue that the only sports-based presumptions of Notability (weak as these are underdtood to be) should be based on achievement-based criteria. Apparently these editors believe they are contributing to the encyclopaedia through this pincer movement of eliminating consistent criteria for inclusion while restricting the range of relevant sources and raising the required threshold of significance in each source, but all this does is weaken the encyclopaedia by making the coverage of female athletes and of athletes from smaller, less wealthy and non-anglophone countries more inconsistent, sporadic and poor - creating walled deserts, as it were.

And re: How many years were men playing on the national teams of various sports... - What is the relevance of the fact that for one hundred years or so of the modern era, the field of athletics was dominated by men? The same could be said of science, or of the humanities, or of art or politics or business. What matters to me is that at the present time, football in particular is more equal by gender in terms of achievement at the highest level than is science, say, or business or many other fields. But the sources lag the reality on the ground, and so a source-based standard like GNG without a presumption based on an achievement-based standard like national-team caps - and anyone who doesn't understand national caps as achievement simple doesn't understand football - is a recipe to disadvantage women's athletic biographies against those of men.


 * Newimpartial (talk) 13:40, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * "Routine" is referenced numerous times outside of and pertaining to more than just NEVENTs, which itself is based on NOTNEWS policy: For example, routine news coverage of announcements, events, sports, or celebrities, while sometimes useful, is not by itself a sufficient basis for inclusion of the subject of that coverage (see WP:ROUTINE for more on this with regard to routine events). The "ROUTINE is for events" argument has been invalid for a long time at sportsperson AfDs, as evidenced by the NSPORT guideline referring multiple times to routine match coverage of athletes and the thousands of AfDs where that guidance is successfully invoked.
 * Accusing "editors" of trying to "deliberately starve a domain (in this case, women's athletics) of coverage, based on some prior conviction that it isn't a "worthy" subject for an encyclopaedia" is some bright-line aspersions casting. JoelleJay (talk) 21:43, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment - I think it's important to note that every single PROD tag placed by the IP user that Newimpartial is referencing was reverted, both by me and other users like Arjayay and Renewal6. No one is advocating for that sort of reckless behavior. JTtheOG (talk) 23:25, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The PRODs I added were reckless, but I hope @JTtheOG reviews them because I applied the same rigor and standards they did in researching those subjects before PRODing and could not find SIGCOV by the standards of the other 50 AfDs that JTtheOG started since 17 July, including two that had passed previous AfDs if we reassess some of the suggested sources under the above lens of reliability. If the 50 article JT has raised should be reviewed, so should the ones I PRODed, for the same rationale. -63.224.250.203 (talk) 19:11, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 19:41, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep, clearly passes GNG with plenty of references.--Ortizesp (talk) 05:03, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep - Per above. Clearly significant Saint Kitts women's player. Thanks, Das osmnezz (talk) 16:03, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete - I agree with Reywas92 and JoelleJay that the article fails WP:GNG. When you filter out sources that are primary coverage, routine, not in-depth or not independent, there isn't much left. The SBNation article has a few useful sentences about Mills' performance in three Olympic qualifying matches (probably a little more than "routine"), but I'm unsure of its status as a reliable source versus a host for All for XI's blogposts. The Times (Trenton)'s coverage is the kind of local high school athlete coverage that is insufficient to establish notability. I just don't see anything approaching multiple (or even single) instances of SIGCOV here. The editors trying to cobble together large amounts of low-quality (non-SIRS) coverage to claim a GNG pass are going against long-standing consensus at footballer AfDs. Jogurney (talk) 16:41, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * No opinion yet on notability, but I don't think SB Nation can just be discounted here like multiple users are saying. They seem to have a paid staff and I don't think just anyone can publish articles through them, plus they're cited here tens of thousands of times (and that's just citing the general website, there's plenty of other citations to sub-websites, e.g. 400+ for Outsports). I've also used them several times for football (gridiron) and they seem pretty reliable. BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:37, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * My concern is whether that blogpost is a self-published source; it's hosted by SBNation, but what editorial control do they exercise over it. I see that a Jeremiah Oshan oversees SBNation's soccer blogs, and he used to be a writer, columist and editor, so that's somewhat promising. However, even if the SBNation post is a reliable source, it's a few sentences of coverage in total. Jogurney (talk) 20:11, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Delete the best articles on her are high school articles which fail WP:YOUNGATH, and while she was the local college athlete of the week a couple times, I don't think it's quite enough. Assuming the Trentonian article that's on her as a college player counts - and I'm not sure it does, but it's not impossible - I still don't think we have quite enough for WP:GNG. I didn't see SIGCOV in the SB Nation article, either. SportingFlyer  T · C  21:04, 27 July 2023 (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.