Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Doug Peltz


 * 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 no consensus. (non-admin closure) Vaticidalprophet (talk) 04:31, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Doug Peltz

 * – ( View AfD View log )

I came across this version of the article. It seems to have a lot of sources, so I started doing some editing to trim away the puff, but as I dug deeper I found that the sourcing wasn't really there - many of the cites were to the subject's own website and social media accounts, or to a Forbes piece by a 'contributor' (see WP:FORBESCON); the news articles include passing mentions and apparent press releases, and there are interviews with one of the investors in his company. If we were to cut it back to what the reliable, independent sources say (and we'd need to assume that they are all talking about the same Doug Peltz), we'd be left with an assertion that he once saw a fireball in the sky, and an assertion that he found an invasive insect in California (not that he wrote the paper about it - he's just listed in the paper about it as one of the people who found the insects). Looking for sources online I can see more press releases and interviews, but I can't see anything which is reliable, independent, secondary and which gives him significant coverage - I don't think he meets GNG. Girth Summit  (blether) 12:44, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Entertainment-related deletion discussions.  Girth Summit  (blether)  12:44, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  Girth Summit  (blether)  12:44, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions.  Girth Summit  (blether)  12:44, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions.  Girth Summit  (blether)  12:44, 28 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom, coverage is minor and rarely directly about him. – Thjarkur (talk) 12:56, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm only an intermediate wikipedia editor so I've never replied to a deletion comment like this. I hope I am doing it correctly. I don't see a "reply" link anywhere so I hope it's okay for me to simply reply beneath your text. I was the one that created this page. Doug Peltz is a bigger celebrity today than Bill Nye. He is the modern day Bill Nye or Mr. Wizard or Magic School Bus. He is a huge celebrity with kids today. My kids are crazy about him, all of their friends know who he is. I was surprised to find there was not a page about him so I did my best to create one.

I will spend some time reviewing the sources I found more closely, but there is no question in my mind that we should have an entry for him. His company, Mystery Science, is *the* thing that I and pretty much every teacher uses with students in their classrooms. As I was reading more about him, I see that investors have given him millions of dollars and his company is now part of Discovery Education. Maybe those sources will be more credible? I'll do an edit now to improve this. Jjwilliamson (talk) 15:00, 28 December 2020 (UTC)


 * I have now added multiple additional sources of significant coverage that I found after some more searching. Now that I know how to tag :) I'm tagging you here Jjwilliamson (talk) 16:27, 28 December 2020 (UTC)


 * I did further research and added more sources that are directly about him, and better organized the opening section to group the different areas of coverage., I'd love to have you share any further feedback. I appreciate your early feedback and I think this article is a lot stronger now because of it. I hope you agree. Jjwilliamson (talk) 05:26, 1 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi or, I'm tagging you because I saw you were involved in helping resolve previous "flagged for deletion" pages. I've been a casual editor of wikipedia for awhile, but this was the first time I was inspired to create a page from scratch with some holiday downtime. GirthSummit gave me some great feedback about my original version and I've put in a lot of time to source better material that are primarily about the individual and speak to his notability. (I'm a fan of this individual myself and thought he really deserves a wikipedia page when I discovered he didn't have one.) In any case, I wanted to see if one of you could help resolve the pending state and help me get this approved. Thanks! Jjwilliamson (talk) 20:37, 2 January 2021 (UTC)


 * , Can you link the three best sources in the article that shows Peltz is notable? CaptainEek  Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 21:11, 2 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Sure! And thanks for chiming in to help . I appreciate the response and encouragement. I feel like I've become a crash-course expert on the guy so it's fun to try and summarize.


 * To answer your question: if I had to point you to the top 3 sources that he is notable: (1) EdSurge article reporting on the company he co-founded being acquired for 140 million dollars which is used in 50% of U.S. elementary schools and he was quite literally the face of the company—he's the star of every video of theirs which I show my students (TechCrunch also covered this Discovery Education acquisition, not sure which source we consider more reliable, I linked you to EdSurge since it included more detail and they're more reputable for us educators); (2) his recent feature on NPR as their special guest answering kids' questions live on the air in response to the coronavirus ; (3) Business Insider coverage of his partnership with Google around the big solar eclipse (also covered by TechCrunch and Mashable, not sure which we consider the most reputable). Does that help summarize things?


 * I know that the GNG say that "fame, importance, or popularity" are not primarily what makes someone notable, "although those may enhance the acceptability of a subject." To that end, there are numerous claims that 1 out of 5 kids (or 4-5 million kids) in the U.S. watch his videos. There were some secondary news sources that repeated this claim so it's not just coming from the company, however I couldn't verify that statistic myself beyond news coverage stating it. I know my class (and all the other teachers I know) just watches his videos on the website (mysteryscience.com) and they don't have viewership numbers publicly displayed on there. But I did find that they cross-post their videos to YouTube and we can see view counts on that website with many videos more than a million: https://www.youtube.com/c/MysteryDoug/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid . But I think most people just watch on mysteryscience.com


 * But just to give you a sense of this guy's fame, there were photos going around FB every year of kids across the country dressing up as him for Halloween. :) I've heard stories of him visiting school districts and they literally pull all the kids out of class and do an assembly with him (I wish my school would do this!) I mention all this only in the spirit of "enhancing acceptability of the subject." I understand we need to rely on the primary GNG guidelines which I tried to summarize for you above with those top 3 sources.


 * How's all that?

Jjwilliamson (talk) 04:17, 3 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment: Jjwilliamson, would you mind if I reformat your comments here into a more standard format? It's probably hard for others to understand what you're saying. Jmill1806 (talk) 22:48, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Jjwilliamson, I reformatted them to help with legibility. Feel free to undo. There is no rule on Wikipedia that you have to format a certain way, but it helps other editors understand your point of view. Jmill1806 (talk) 13:04, 5 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep: The article and discussion on this page are obviously cluttered and messy, which makes it hard to see what the best case is for WP:BASIC, WP:ANYBIO, or WP:CREATIVE. The best case I can see are mentions of Peltz in Forbes (looks like an opinion piece, not journalistic), TechCrunch 1 and TechCrunch 2, Mashable, and Business Insider. There is also a list mention of Mystery Science in WSJ and coverage in niche outlets and regional news such as Wisconsin Public Radio. To me this meets the bar for WP:BASIC. I can help clean up the article if we keep it. Jmill1806 (talk) 23:00, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment: Thank you . You did a good job of summarizing the case for WP:BASIC, making it much more clear than I did. Let's go ahead and move forward with the clean up, unless someone objects. I appreciate any help you can provide. Jjwilliamson (talk) 01:33, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You're very welcome! Thank you for your hard work on this article. Please don't feel bad if the result of this discussion is Deletion. You could use a guide like WP:YFA to try to avoid this in the future by selecting a more clearly notable subject, or you could focus on adding information to existing articles, which is often less controversial among Wikipedia editors. In this case, consider adding the info to Mystery Science if the Peltz page is deleted. Feel free to drop a message on my Talk page anytime. Jmill1806 (talk) 13:11, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * the Forbes piece is from a 'contributor' - see WP:FORBESCON, there's consensus that articles like that are generally unreliable, and therefore don't convey notability. The Tech Crunch articles, in my view, are really about the company - they namecheck this subject, but they contain no information about him at all except that he's a former science teacher. See also the RSP entry for TechCrunch, which questions its usefulness for determining notability because of their willingness to use PR material from companies. The same for the Mashable and Business Insider pieces (which seems to be a recycled press release) - they're about the company not the founder. I think that a case might be made for the company being notable, but for me there isn't enough for a BLP about the founder. Girth Summit  (blether)  07:24, 5 January 2021 (UTC) (amended  Girth Summit  (blether)  08:27, 5 January 2021 (UTC))
 * I appreciate your point of view and agree with the contributor issue for Forbes and the PR-recycling issues for TechCrunch, Mashable, and Business Insider. To me that still meets the bar for WP:BASIC/WP:GNG. Moreover it seems that, in this field of science education, Peltz is probably prominent enough to meet something like WP:CREATIVE#3 for the creation of Mystery Science. Jmill1806 (talk) 13:08, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , respectfully, the sources in the article are clearly not enough to pass WP:BASIC - that calls for multiple sources that are reliable, independent, secondary and give significant depth of coverage. I can't see any that tick all of those boxes. NCREATIVE#3 might be closer - I'm not persuaded, but I'll grant you it's nearer the mark. Girth Summit  (blether)  16:25, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * you are much more experienced at this than I am, however, WP:BASIC explicitly says, "If the depth of coverage in any given source is not substantial, then multiple independent sources may be combined." So we shouldn't rule out all of the sources that don't give significant depth of coverage of the person because we can consider them in combination. So I think the key question is: do we have multiple sources that are reliable, independent, and secondary which, combined, cover the subject enough? If we are discounting the Forbes article, here are four that are all clearly secondary sources, they are reliable organizations, and they are independent of the person. And they're all about the person himself (in addition to also being about his organization, but they're not solely about the organization): Wisconsin Public Radio, Business Insider, Orange County Register, EdSurge. Maybe we should shift the evaluation to WP:CREATIVE#3 instead, if that's easier, but I'm still struggling to understand why this doesn't meet WP:BASIC so this further elaboration on my part is also for my own learning. Jjwilliamson (talk) 17:33, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , so, first off we have to consider whether or not the articles are truly independent. The Business Insider source looks like a rehashed press release - they even link to the press statement that they draw their information from - that's not independent. The Wisconsin Public Radio source is also non-independent - it's a profile on the website of a radio station he is affiliated with (he does a short slot on their morning show) - that also rules it out. Even if we were to accept all of these sources though, I'd question the validity of combining multiple insubstantial sources that all say the same thing about a subject. I can see why one would want to pull together different bits of information from different sources, but in this case all of these sources tell us the same basic facts: he used to be a science teacher, and he founded MysteryScience. The information they tell us about this subject could be summed up in a single sentence in an article about the company itself, we don't need a separate article on him. That's my take on it anyway - the discussion has been relisted, so will run for another week, let's see what others think. Girth Summit  (blether)  14:35, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * we'll wait for others to chime in, but since you articulated two assumptions that were informing your judgement which I believe are mistaken, I should at least clarify these for others reading this. (1) there is no evidence Peltz is affiliated with Wisconsin Public Radio. They clearly make a "guest profile" page for every guest they have on every show. (example); (2) the Business Insider piece is not just a re-hash of the press release, they clearly interviewed Peltz. I found the press release and there were clearly details in the article that were beyond the scope of the press release. Again, we'll wait for others but just wanted to correct those. Jjwilliamson (talk) 21:44, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Northern Escapee (talk) 17:41, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep: Article is good enough to pass WP:BASIC with the reliable sources indicated by Jjwilliamson and Jmill1806. ASTIG😎  (ICE T • ICE CUBE) 14:35, 13 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it.</b> 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.