Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Greg Brockman (2nd nomination)


 * 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. Given problems with npov this could be as much a TNT job as a GNG. There is no objection to someone trying to write a clean correctly sourced non promotional and npov article but given problems here I'm salting so that the draft gets reviewed before going into mainspace. Spartaz Humbug! 08:05, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

Greg Brockman
AfDs for this article: 
 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Since the last deletion discussion in November the article has changed significantly, but the basic problem - the lack of significant coverage of Brockman in reliable third-party sources - remains unaddressed. Instead, the article subtly misrepresents the passing mentions it is largely based on and inflates Brockman's role. Huon (talk) 09:43, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Businesspeople-related deletion discussions.  sst  ✈  14:27, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Dear Huon (talk), please provide evidence before deletion nomination. Deletion aggression seems to be a trend now in technology entrepreneur articles, so I'm going to take the time to debunk it in the case of this particular article. Your vague claims are not supported by the citations in this article. For one, Brockman is the exclusive subject of interview here and here. That's BusinessInsider, which Alexa ranks as the 250th most-trafficked site. Please tell me how that's not of significant noteworthiness. Second, I couldn't find one citation in this article that over-inflated Brockman's involvement or position. Please show me one that does. Finally, you mention "reliable" third-party sources. Scroll down to the References section of this article: Wired, Breitbart, WSJ, SFGate, FastCompany, Seattle Times, NY Times, The Guardian, New Yorker, Slate. Please show me which aren't credible. Executionary (talk) 18:43, 22 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment For example:
 * "At Stripe, Brockman shaped portions of the company's organization and technology while helping the company raise over $190 million in funding." - of the two references, one is written by Brockman himself and not a suitable source for arguably promotional content; the other does not mention him at all. Neither mentions Brockman's role in securing the funding, if any. Response from Executionary: I agree. The citations here are weak. Just updated to remove fundraising claim.
 * "He co-founded the company alongside technology entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Sam Altman." - two references, neither says Brockman was a co-founder. / Response from Executionary: He's listed as the co-founder here . I've swapped this citation in.
 * "Brockman is responsible for designing the team's operating structure and recruiting researchers from the field, including former Google scientist and neural network pioneer Ilya Sutskever as Research Director and Durk Kingma (inventor of the variational autoencoder) as a scientist." - two references, neither of which mentions Brockman; those sources which do mention both Brockman and Sutskever mention them side-by-side and give no indication that one was responsible for hiring the other. / Response from Executionary: His BusinessInsider interview here states he "He says, OpenAI's focus was on making sure that it had the right organizational structure and recruiting the right people to give it a solid foundation for its future research over a span of years and decades." Seems clear he's describing what he's in charge of as the CTO — the person who makes technical and therefore technical recruiting decisions. More concretely, however, is this: "Greg came in from nowhere and scooped up the top people to do something great and make something new." I've swapped the citations in.
 * "Brockman introduced an "open by default" email policy to Stripe's internal communications, which was cited in the technology and business press as a novel approach to fostering company culture." - four references, not one of them crediting Brockman with introducing the policy - all they say is he wrote a blog post about it. / Response from Executionary: GigaOM covers his policy here, and he announces it in his own blog post on Stripe, as you mentioned.
 * Does that list of examples suffice to give an idea of how the article inflates what the citations say (or don't say) about Brockman? The Guardian and The New Yorker do not mention Brockman at all. Slate and NYT do, but only in passing without providing any details. In fact, The New York Times is cited for two sentences that are not about Brockman in the first place and should be removed even if Brockman were notable enough for an article. Huon (talk) 19:25, 22 January 2016 (UTC) / Response from Executionary: Nearly all the links I look at mention Greg Brockman directly or quote from him. A few that are being cited for supporting evidence do not.

Keep per the significant coverage from multiple independent reliable sources. The subject passes WP:BASIC:, , , ,. He is cited by name by in all of them, and directly interviewed/quoted by most. Numericality 22 January 2016


 * Delete I'm finding disturbing disconnect between what is said in some sources and what is in the article. This source says that the founders of OpenAI were Musk and Altman. Brockman is said to be CTO, but is not named as a founder. Yet the text says that Brockman founded the company ... with Musk and Altman, making it sound like Brockman was the main founder, or at least one of the main founders. It does the same thing in another part of the article. Here are two bits of text:
 * article: "serves as the CTO of the artificial intelligence non-profit OpenAI, which he co-founded with technology entrepreneurs Elon Musk (of Tesla and SpaceX) and Sam Altman (of Y Combinator)"
 * source: "OpenAI, the new company cofounded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman, took a long time to come to fruition, says CTO Greg Brockman."


 * I removed a few promotional statements, and when I started checking references many did not support the statements they follow. It turned out to be a big job to go through it all, but when I saw the part about founding the company I concluded that nothing in the article could be trusted. Also, the article has been WP:REFBOMBed with four or five cites for a single statement of fact. Taken together, I am concluding that this article violates WP:PROMO and WP:NPOV. It is quite possible that a non-promotional article could show notability, but this isn't that. LaMona (talk) 23:34, 24 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete for now as questionably solid despite some links here and there, restart if better later at best. SwisterTwister   talk  07:32, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Keep: as per Numericality's rationale. No proper reason given to delete this article. --Fixuture (talk) 19:26, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, — UY Scuti Talk  17:04, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. He has not gotten substantially more notable since the first AfD. Claim such as "shaped portions of the company's organization and technology" or while "helping the company raise XXX million" are vague; every executive in the firm at the time could probably say that. "Founder" is often claimed, but needs to be documented--many new companies list quite a number of people as co-founder, but that doesn't necessarily indicate a role. Ref 4, a Huffington Post article not substantially about him, lists him as founder, but all other sources name only Musk and Altman.    I agree with  that this is pretty close to G11 territory .  Borderline notability combined with clear promotionalism is an   good reason for deletion.   DGG ( talk ) 21:54, 3 February 2016 (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.