Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/National Punctuation Day


 * 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. (non-admin closure) Erik9 (talk) 19:24, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

National Punctuation Day

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Failed prod. Appears to fail WP:NOTE. Coverage in reliable sources seems to be blurbs or short bits not precisely rising to the level of "significant coverage"; lots of reproductions of PR releases. "Holiday" is a mere five years old, part of a literacy campaign from a former editor named Jeff Rubin (not Jeff Rubin), and not garnering the kind of coverage one would expect from a notable event. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 12:59, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep this day easily meets the GNG with 86 news stories. (The fact that it isn't an official holiday is irrelevant.)  Not sure why the nominator feels the press coverage is trivial, as a majority of the stories are specifically about the day, including stories every year since its invention.   A small sampling of coverage includes: Sacramento Bee (2004), Tampa Tribune (2005), Register-Herald (2006), San Antonio Express (2007), Atlanta Constitution Journal (2008)], even the Malaysia Star (2009) mentions it. The lack of notability of its creator is also irrelevant. --ThaddeusB (talk) 13:59, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment: I don't have access to most of your references, so I cannot personally verify them; nor did they come up from Google news search or Yahoo news search. I do not feel that the mentions in any of the others truly merit "significant coverage".  That's why I brought it here. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 14:44, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment You're not looking at the Google News Archive results. Zagalejo^^^ 20:14, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep A Google news search open to "all dates" comes up with plenty of reliable sources, 1.--J.Mundo (talk) 15:46, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment: Again, none of the sources contain significant coverage. It's like the story about a boy who got rescued from an alligator's stomach, but doesn't get his own article.  Sure, it's covered all over the place, but not in a non-trivial way. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 15:56, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
 * You dont think this is significant They’re ‘passionate’ about punctuation?, there is more like this one in the 86 sources you failed to find in your search.--J.Mundo (talk) 16:08, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
 * No, in fact, I don't think it is significant at all. The holiday gets one mention in the beginning of the article, which then goes on to talk almost exclusively about "The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks", written by Bethany Keeley, a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia.  They don't interview the creator of the holiday, expound on the "widespread-ness" of it, or anything else at all, for that matter.  It's probably about as trivial as you can get! - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 16:18, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment You wouldn't know it from the article, but it's September 24. No jokes about colon screening or missed periods, please.  Mandsford (talk) 20:10, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment - quotable website/blog, a few press releases, softball "interview", all feels like an easy column-filler for the hacks on a slow news day. CobaltBlueTony's judgment that the bulk of the coverage is essentially trivial is correct, perhaps even a dangerously generous understatement. It is basically journogarbage, the type of bilge that gets excreted despite the appalling mass of unreported poverty, inequality, urban neglect, environmental degradation, corruption and discrimination, and in spite of the neglected coverage of critically important, no-easy-answer challenges in foreign policy, medical ethics, narcotics enforcement, human rights and global trade... because it's "better" news: quicker, easier and cheaper to get into print, not requiring expensive specialist correspondents or investigative journalism, not important enough to necessitate rigorous fact-checking or raise issues that might be "sensitive" to the proprietor. And of course it doesn't require the reader to think critically, or self-reflect, or quake with righteous indignation, so I guess it's easier all round. I'm not convinced it's more "notable" when essentially identical, trivial facts are reported in several dozen news sources (an easy opportunity for one journo is an easy opportunity for them all), or even when they are re-reported overseas (even them foreign computers have got web access, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V; it seems from the work of Ben Goldacre and others that Brit newspapers will regurgitate shamelessly too, and I can't believe this is just an Anglo-Saxon disease). It sits very uncomfortably with me that this type of newspadding, albeit extensive - so many columns to be filled, ever fewer staff to do it! - is enough to cross our threshold of notability. The implication is that anybody who can write a blog, publish a press release and possibly wrangle some journalistic contacts, is worthy of encyclopedic treatment so long as they can produce a half-decent meme. (You can probably guess where I stand on whether this article is kept or not, but I'm declining to "vote" because to be honest I don't know how I would rephrase the general notability guideline in a way that wouldn't also negatively impact valid topics that are obscure only due to media and academic bias and neglect. Classicists inform me that the surviving writings of the ancient Romans and Greeks are so manageably finite that every person mentioned by name has been catalogued - those that could not make the biographical dictionary have been lost to history. It seems the organizers of National Punctuation Day have done rather better than them, and their press coverage has guaranteed that when the automated knowledge-compilers and robo-historians of the future trawl the digital web, their deeds will not be lost. If Wikipedia is but a metarecorder of all reported human endeavour, then their creation may very well be "notable". My doubts are that in its current incarnation, this is not something Wikipedia can achieve or should aspire to - such a model would be unsustainable, and in particular its articles unmaintainable. Lowest common denominator journalism-by-press-release is basically designed to self-replicate, and encouraging its infiltration and reproduction here merely carves out our use as a tool by the more adept publicity-seeker.) TheGrappler (talk) 05:08, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * It doesn't sound like he wants to keep the article. Mandsford (talk) 15:01, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Too long; didn't read, this is just a simple discussion to determine if we have enough coverage to meet WP:N and not a meta discussion about the sad state of media reporting.--Jmundo (talk) 15:48, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
 * "Enough coverage" is an interesting concept. Does "enough" mean quantity is valued over quality? This is garbage reporting, but we've got a lot of said garbage. So everything is A-OK? This deletion debate interests me because it is one of the best examples I've seen where the notability-through-sourcing issue and the inane quality of media reporting are brought head-to-head. For instance, the press coverage is little more than regurgitation of self-publicity, which we would probably reject as "trivial". But perhaps there is that wee bit more added to it by the journalists involved - it's not just the virtually verbatim reprint of a press release, a spacefilling technique that takes up a significant proportion of a typical modern newspaper. You could feasibly keep this on the grounds of existence of multiple independent sources. I'm tempted to argue that since all sources are just restating what comes from the "NPD movement" (such as it is), they're effectively not independent - but I don't think that's quite true, because the published stories aren't identical. In short, I am at a loss what to do in a case where multiple sources exist and are arguably non-trivial, but are essentially utter pap. I think the best pro-deletion argument in this case has not actually been explicitly written yet. National Punctuation Day is essentially not a calendar event in the same sense as Veterans Day or Easter Sunday or a national No Smoking Day; it is basically a very small pressure group, and fails our appropriate notability standard (WP:GROUP) by some way. Unfortunately the bit it clearly fails by is the WP:CLUB subsection (which smells distinctly applicable to me); however, there is also the possibility of notability-by-sourcing being met. Are these sources genuinely "independent of the subject" if at heart they are just spewed out self-publicity? Are they genuinely "significant coverage"? I think that is a very tight call. I don't like the idea of this article passing our sourcing criteria - it is perfectly clear that the membership behind NPD is both very small yet very good at self-publicity. Their global or local impact is clearly trivial - getting the press coverage they do is virtually their raison d'etre (it's essentially an awareness-raising campaign, NPD is just a gimmick to get stories about punctuation into papers). I'd rest easier if secondary sources that merely requote primary sources or include a softball interview (which is basically just another way to quote primary sources) were excluded as "non-significant coverage" in our notability guidelines, but they're not. As a result, I don't feel I can give a good faith "delete" !vote, since I'm worried that it would be more WP:IDONTLIKEIT than a fair application of our guidelines to a borderline case. To me this feels like it should be a pretty clear-cut delete, and therefore there is surely a problem with the guidelines if it isn't. Yet I've not seen a knock-out pro-delete argument so far. TheGrappler (talk) 22:13, 9 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep Sufficient coverage in Google news to indicate that this has received significant coverage in independent sources.  JMundo indicates that the other comments are about the media giving publicity to such frivolous things as National Punctuation Day, perhaps so, didn't really have the time to read them.  Most "national _____ day" stunts attract no attention at all.  Mandsford (talk) 13:19, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment: "Didn't have time to read" what? Did you read any of the multiple sources generated by your Google search?  Please do; you'll see that the coverages in each of them hardly constitute "significant" coverage.  Each item is a fluff piece, meant to fill space not sold to advertisers in the print editions.  Keep in mind, also, that the promotor of this particular holiday is a journalist himself, capable of using the right contacts to inflate an article count. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 13:38, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep Meets current notability guidelines; some seem to think that those guidelines are incorrect, in which case, please discuss them in the appropriate place.  Chzz  ►  15:24, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep based on news coverage. Someone might've just made it up one day, but others have covered it, making it notable now.  There should be a government body somewhere, or a union of calender makers, that keeps track of what days are recognized for what.  Then against, Breast Cancer societies declared a day/week/month for that, and many others do the same for whatever they want.  PETA probably has an animal appreciation awareness of rights day, or something like that.  You can have an official Get Drunk and Blow Off Work day if you want to, as long as you get enough people in the news media to mention it.   D r e a m Focus  19:49, 10 August 2009 (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.