Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John Moore (baseball)


 * 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. The finding of more sources pushed the consensus towards the subject meeting WP:GNG, thus rendering moot the policy disputes over the ideal relationship between different notability guidelines. RL0919 (talk) 13:26, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

John Moore (baseball)

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

Though a common name, I'm not finding enough coverage to meet GNG. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:59, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sportspeople-related deletion discussions. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:59, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Baseball-related deletion discussions. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:59, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:59, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep He meets WP:NBASE 3 as the Birmingham Black Barons were in the Negro National League (I). He likely played more baseball for which the data is not easily accessible on the internet – as is unfortunately the case with a lot of Negro league statistics, but regardless of my hypothesis, he passes a WP:SNG. snood1205 22:18, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Well per Articles for deletion/Pete Vainowski, a topic that meets an SNG but doesn't have enough coverage is non-notable. BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:50, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Taking a look at that AfD it seems like one of the issues is that the page had been around for at least a year without having any significant expansion in coverage. This article being only 2 months old I would hold to a different standard. The standard that was applied there is saying that articles that pass WP:SNG need to ultimately pass WP:GNG; however, articles that pass WP:SNG without immediately passing WP:GNG can be kept to allow for expansion for the article to meet WP:GNG. Especially in the case of athletes where the information is harder to research, allowing more time for expansion seems to make sense to me. I do see there were other arguments as well for delete, but I don't want to specifically rehash that AfD here. snood1205 23:05, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * How much time do you think John Moore should be given for expansion? BTW on Vainowski the article was 7,000+ bytes when deleted. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:20, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * I cannot give a specific amount of time. Notwithstanding, I don't really feel that the result of that AfD is the be-all-and-end-all of results when it comes to WP:SNGs being a keep argument or not a keep argument. It feels a bit WP:WAX. There have been articles kept where the subject at the article's present state fails WP:GNG but passes a WP:SNG and then the article later passes WP:GNG. There have been times, like the AfD you have mentioned, where the article was deleted despite passing an SNG. It varies article-to-article, discussion-to-discussion. snood1205 02:58, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to List of Negro league baseball players (M–R) per his extremely tiny notability, though would have preferred to link to his club's season article if there was one. Geschichte (talk) 09:31, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect: I have the option to bitch and moan like I did in the Vainowski AfD but I'm not gonna. It's pretty obvious that sources aren't gonna exist for a Negro league player who only played 3 games, so that makes the SNG moot. Curbon7 (talk) 10:47, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
 * In light of Penale's research showing his career lasted at least two years for three teams, rather than three games, and the substantial expansion, please have another look. Cbl62 (talk) 03:40, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

While this does happen sporadically on the sports projects pages, I think the difference in underlying article creation motivation at WiR (bolstering coverage of women, with attention to producing quality encyclopedic articles) compared to the SSGs (a very large proportion of creations derive from efforts either to "complete" a category of subjects meeting an SNG, or to boost an editor's creation count; neither puts any emphasis on achieving quality and both encourage database-dump microstubs) is a much bigger factor in how frequently such collaboration occurs. Even if only a small minority of sports project editors mass-create microstubs, the protection afforded by the SNGs allows microstub proliferation to far outpace thoughtful article creation by the majority, and we end up with tens of thousands of bios on people whose notability is not clearly presumable.
 * Keep Played 3 games in a MAJOR LEAGUE. This is a Negro leaguer, where sources are harder to come by, but more info (especially in the last few years) is being dug up. I am leery of the nomination (not their WP:AGF, but possibly WP:POINT); the OP had one of their NFL articles deleted, so now they are targeting MLB articles, but to target a Negro leaguer is in poor taste. Articles for deletion/Pete Vainowski is inappropriate to apply here as it's football (NGRIDIRON) not baseball (NBASE). Rgrds. --Bison X (talk) 23:01, 1 January 2022 (UTC)
 * A few months ago, a baseball bio Featured Article was deleted because it comprehensibly failed WP:GNG. The precedent exists. Curbon7 (talk) 03:36, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
 * If you mean Articles for deletion/Jones (third baseman), then, no, it is not applicable either. "Jones" had so little known about him that his first name was unknown, and his last name may or may not have been that of another player. The article was about the game and other unknown players, not about the article subject.  John Moore, however, is verified to have existed and played in several games that are known about.  Rgrds. --Bison X (talk) 22:14, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
 * He's referring to Articles for deletion/Lewis (baseball) (2nd nomination). BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:20, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Which came a week after Jones & was based solely on the Jones AfD. And my argument for Lewis is word for word what is is for Jones. Not applicable. Rgrds. --Bison X (talk) 23:52, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Redirect to the target suggested above. GNG should be considered largely irrespective of reporting bias, as the subjects should all have SIGCOV whether it be readily on-hand or currently inaccessible; a standalone is not warranted if coverage can't even be presumed, regardless of the reason. The best approach for us to address media discrimination would be for articles such as this to be redirected to lists, and then for the baseball project's Negro league task force (which doesn't seem to have been active since 2016) to coordinate finding sources on each redlinked entry. WiR does this with women's bios all the time: someone comes in with a draft or a list of female award recipients and asks the project to help find refs, and often another editor with access to offline or paywalled sources provides them. The result is a far more fleshed-out profile with GNG sourcing from the get-go.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Less Unless (talk) 13:02, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * JoelleJay (talk) 03:22, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Keep passes the relevant SNG. I disagree with using a wrongly-decided AfD about a different sport as a basis upon which to start attacking baseball articles. L EPRICAVARK ( talk ) 13:13, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep meets notability requirements for having played at the major league level. Unlikely to get much in the way of updates unless an author does a deep dive and writes a book on these players. Oaktree b (talk) 16:34, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * @Oaktree b, @Lepricavark: GNG supersedes NSPORT, so meeting the SNG is actually irrelevant once notability is challenged. Here are the relevant instructions on NSPORT: This guideline is used to help evaluate whether or not a sports person or sports league/organization (amateur or professional) is likely to meet the general notability guideline, and thus merit an article in Wikipedia.
 * The topic-specific notability guidelines described on this page do not replace the general notability guideline.
 * In addition, the subjects of standalone articles should meet the General Notability Guideline. The guideline on this page provides bright-line guidance to enable editors to determine quickly if a subject is likely to meet the General Notability Guideline. JoelleJay (talk) 18:46, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Simply put, I do not believe that we are improving the encyclopedia by eliminating content that covers individuals who played at the level specified by the SNG. I realize that policy technically differs from me on this point, and I also realize that there are some editors who are all too eager to crusade against these "sub-stubs" as if their existence is a stain on Wikipedia's reputation (I suspect that this crowd would overlap significantly with those who whine and complain about the percentage of Wikipedia articles that are sports-related). However, I will stand by my belief that it does not benefit Wikipedia to cover 99% of all Major League Baseball players but then apply GNG to a small handful. L EPRICAVARK ( talk ) 01:19, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
 * The thing is, we work on other areas of the encyclopaedia as well and like some rough level of consistency in how people are treated. Giving an article to everyone who ever played a single baseball game at a particular level and this is the only thing known about them would be the equivalent of giving one to everyone who ever founded a business, or wrote a book, or was notable because of a single event. Here we literally just have a database entry and that's it. Liking or disliking sports doesn't even come into it. FOARP (talk) 10:38, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
 * The thing is, we work on other areas of the encyclopaedia as well and like some rough level of consistency in how people are treated. Giving an article to everyone who ever played a single baseball game at a particular level and this is the only thing known about them would be the equivalent of giving one to everyone who ever founded a business, or wrote a book, or was notable because of a single event. Here we literally just have a database entry and that's it. Liking or disliking sports doesn't even come into it. FOARP (talk) 10:38, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

*Redirect - Lacks any sigcov, keep !votes are leaning hard on an SNG but ultimately this guy still has to meet GNG and he doesn't (and even if he did, the minimal content makes this a WP:NOPAGE case). The only sources here are "listings in database sources with low, wide-sweeping generic standards of inclusion" which are excluded from showing notability per WP:SPORTCRIT. FOARP (talk) 19:26, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep Based on Cbl62 and Penale52’s new sources. Congratulations to them for finding the sourcing that I and others failed to find. FOARP (talk) 06:18, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment. Having played only three games, Moore is not the best test case, but the Negro Leagues are a special case. Due to systemic racial bias in the mainstream (i.e., white) media, and despite having athletes competing on the same level as the white major leagues, Negro league players were largely ignored. Adding to the difficulty, most of the black newspapers from the 1920s and 1930s haven't yet been added to Newspapers.com. The result of this systemic bias is that our articles even on everyday Negro leaguers like Steel Arm Davis (20-year pro career), Harry Jeffries (19-year career), and Ambrose Reid (13-year career) lack SIGCOV. We need to be more lenient in the level of coverage required for Negro leaguers. Cbl62 (talk) 14:42, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not here to right great wrongs. When those sources become more available, and assuming (as is actually unlikely) they gave Moore any significant coverage, then the article can be created with actual content. Actually, from experience, the existence of this article may dissuade people from creating a better one. FOARP (talk) 16:54, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Hold up. All disagreement aside, but arguing that an existing article should be deleted because it prevents someone else from creating a better article is not a reason to delete. Rgrds. --Bison X (talk) 17:52, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I’m arguing that we should not simply keep an article with no sourcing indicating notability because sourcing might one day show up. The existence of this article actually de-incentivises people to go out and find that sourcing (assuming, as is unlikely, that it exists).FOARP (talk) 19:26, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Three questions: (1) If we know a subject received SIGCOV, but it was exclusively in sources that are absolutely irrecoverable, should an encyclopedia still cover them? (2) Does this change if the irrecoverability is a consequence of systemic oppression? (3) Does any relaxation of our guidelines/WP:NOT due to (2) apply to people who only might have received SIGCOV? JoelleJay (talk) 18:50, 5 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Comment. Moore has an entry in the The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues by James A. Riley, which expands on his career some. It actually began in 1928 with the Pittsburgh Crawfords while they were a semi-pro club before he moved on to the Homestead Grays that August. I was able to find two mentions of him in the Pittsburgh Courier, along with the interesting note that when he and another player left the Crawfords, that opened a roster spot for none other than Josh Gibson. I have updated the article accordingly, but will continue to search for more on Moore, no pun intended. Penale52 (talk) 03:09, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. The 12-line biographical entry in The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues qualifies, if marginally, as SIGCOV. Thanks to the efforts of User:Penale52, it is also now apparent that his Negro league career was not limited to three games but instead extended over at least two years. This article was created less than two months ago and has already developed significantly (three-fold expansion of narrative text) during the pendency of this AfD. If the presumption of notability is not completely illusory and has any effect whatsoever, this article should be allowed further time to develop. It is entirely likely that, given the length of his baseball career, additional SIGCOV will be included in other black newspaper outlets of the time. Cbl62 (talk) 03:38, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I have also added some content from Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh published by the University of Illinois Press that has a paragraph about his multi-sport career. It turns out he was also a star on one of the early black professional basketball teams known as the Black Fives -- and also played semipro black football as quarterback of a Pittsburgh team. Expansion of narrative text now more than ten-fold in the last few hours. Do any of the redirect voters still believe this article is not worth saving and continued development?? Cbl62 (talk) 04:38, 7 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Switched to weak keep, based on the strengthened presumption of SIGCOV sources existing offered by the Riley profile and Sandlot mention uncovered by and . While the surprisingly numerous sources on his high school and semipro basketball career aren't particularly deep, I did enjoy the old-timey turns of phrase used in this article, praising him and his all-star section teammate as "youthful satellites of the hardwood", and this one, where the author really hammered home a triple horse derby/Paul Revere/elk-based theme in his description of each Iron City Elks "midnight basketball" player ("Now listen, my readers, and you shall hear more about these modern Paul Reveres: ... A worthy leader of these antlered galloping ponies of the polished floors is Hilton "Scummy" Slocum, former pacer of the great Renaissance stable.") JoelleJay (talk) 08:51, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
 * For better or worse, they don't write 'em like that any more. Cbl62 (talk) 16:39, 7 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Comment, wow! That was some great work done by Penale52 and Cbl62. I agree he now meets GNG. I'm surprised I wasn't able to find any of that in my search. Is there a way I can withdraw this AFD? BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:40, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
 * You can only withdraw if there are no votes other than "Keep", but your inclination to withdraw should be weighed by the closer. Cbl62 (talk) 16:38, 7 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Weak keep. Based on the sources added after the AfD started there is now a stronger presumption that SIGCOV sources exist. I suggest that the name of the article be changed though, maybe to John Moore (multi-sport athlete) as he was clearly more than just a baseball player. Alvaldi (talk) 10:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment Not sure if it helps but this 1928 article in the Pittsburgh Press names him John "Judy" Moore. There was a Judy Moore who played baseball for for a team named Ozark Pilots in Alabama from around 1934 to 1935, though I can't be certain if it is the same person. Alvaldi (talk) 13:57, 9 January 2022 (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.