Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Penelope Trunk (4th 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 keep. Joyous! | Talk 04:49, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Penelope Trunk
AfDs for this article:


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

Fails all criteria for WP:WRITER. The majority of cited sources are primary, meaning the article is sourced mostly from statements she has made about herself. The secondary sources are of poor quality, consisting largely of blogs, opinion pieces, dead links and pages which mention her without containing substantive information. Several of the cited sources don't mention her at all and appear to have nothing to do with her. A number of statements made in the article are unverified, with cited sources that do not support the statement. Because of this, and the excessive reliance on primary sources, the accuracy and neutrality of the article is questionable. Furthermore, the are numerous WP:COI issues with this article. In [| this blog post] Trunk admits that the editor of her blog edits her Wikipedia page. [| The creator of this article] has contributed nothing to Wikipedia except for creating this (promotional) article and editing it once; this person may be Trunk herself or somebody connected to her. This further calls into question the accuracy and neutrality of the article. Due to conflict of interest issues, shortage of quality sources and failure to meet notability guidelines, I believe the article can't be salvaged and should be deleted. Baronet13 (talk) 23:48, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Authors, Women,  and Illinois. Shellwood (talk) 01:04, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment: well, I've spent about 20 minutes on this so far and it's clear that whoever maint tagged this article - festooned it, see diff from before I started checking - didn't actually check any of the sources. Many are listed as irrelevant citations, but are relevant and do support the material. She is widely cited for Six Sex Scenes, and I expect she has a solid case for WP:NAUTHOR and WP:GNG. But I'm still digging through this excessive tagging. If COI editors are constantly making trouble here, AfD isn't the venue for that. -- asilvering (talk) 02:56, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep. It's a yes to both WP:NAUTHOR and WP:GNG, I'd say. I've added reviews for Making Scenes, and Six Sex Scenes is definitely notable as well. I presume her book Brazen Careerist is as well, but I don't want to dig through all the promo material to prove it when her fiction already shows WP:NAUTHOR to me. She had her divorce written about at length in the NYT, she caused a bunch more headlines for her tweets about her miscarriage - there's all kinds of WP:GNG material here, along with a whole lot of gossip-rag-type stuff. Not to mention that when people write about her it's with an "of course, everyone knows about Penelope Trunk" kind of tone. I'm sure this is due to her being, as Frank Bures wrote, "a ruthless, relentless self-promoter". Many of the previous editors of the page have been blocked as socks, and the article is not in great shape. Possibly it should be page-protected to save everyone else's time, but she's notable and the article should remain. -- asilvering (talk) 04:18, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep per source filtering by Asilvering and others in the three previous AfDs, particularly reviews satisfying WP:NAUTHOR and the New York writeup (The Cut is a vertical of New York magazine, see WP:RSP). Many of the arguments in previous AfDs no longer apply ("sources may eventually appear," "one event" in 2011). The article is indeed a mess right now, but AfD is not cleanup. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:08, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep. I agree that the sourcing in this article is poor and mainly comprised of first-party sources. She's a tough one to find third-party sources for because she was a syndicated columnist -- published internationally in such papers as The Boston Globe, The Guardian and the Ottawa Citizen-- so any name search within a repository like ProQuest (which any tenured wiki editor can access via the Wikimedia Library) or newspaper archives bring up many more articles that she wrote, versus those written about her, but in doing some digging I did find some information about her from reliable sources.
 * I'm not sure if you have access to Newspapers.com, but I found this front page story about her in The Capital Times just prior to the release of her book about careers, which also mentions that she was "cited by both Time magazine and London's Guardian newspaper as a new breed of worker." That article also confirms that her birth name is Adrienne Roston. There's this article from The Arizona Star's Careers section where her blog was listed as one "5 job blogs you should be reading".
 * She also made international news in 2009 for a tweet she made about her miscarriage that went viral -- if you google "penelope trunk miscarriage" and you'll find articles from a multitude of publications in both the US and the UK, including The Guardian, the Irish Independent, Huffington Post, New York magazine's The Cut, Marie Claire, and scholarly articles on JSTOR, etc...
 * She is seemingly a go-to commentator about careers, including this article from the ABA Banking Journal about her thoughts about "the new workplace" and this article from Forbes, which also states that she is a "frequent commentator about workplace trends, and she has appeared on outlets such as 20/20, CNN, and NPR." Inc. magazine also called her arguably the world's most influential guidance counselor.
 * While I can find several places citing that she worked under the pseudonym Adrienne Eisen, I have yet to find a reliable source to confirm that she and Trunk are one in the same, but if true, then as Eisen she would seem to be notable in that she was one of the first people to publish a web-based, hyptertext-linked novel (titled Six Sex Scenes, described in this article from PN Review, and found archived here), which is all the more notable given that she is a woman, IMO.
 * In short, I vote against the article's deletion. It needs work for sure, but I think she has enough notability and coverage in reliable sources to remain. Marchije•speak/peek 01:53, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for finding that Inc Magazine article! She seems to really love citing it when talking to other journalists but I wasn't having luck turning up the original article itself. -- asilvering (talk) 15:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
 * While I can find several places citing that she worked under the pseudonym Adrienne Eisen, I have yet to find a reliable source to confirm that she and Trunk are one in the same, but if true, then as Eisen she would seem to be notable in that she was one of the first people to publish a web-based, hyptertext-linked novel (titled Six Sex Scenes, described in this article from PN Review, and found archived here), which is all the more notable given that she is a woman, IMO.
 * In short, I vote against the article's deletion. It needs work for sure, but I think she has enough notability and coverage in reliable sources to remain. Marchije•speak/peek 01:53, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for finding that Inc Magazine article! She seems to really love citing it when talking to other journalists but I wasn't having luck turning up the original article itself. -- asilvering (talk) 15:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
 * In short, I vote against the article's deletion. It needs work for sure, but I think she has enough notability and coverage in reliable sources to remain. Marchije•speak/peek 01:53, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for finding that Inc Magazine article! She seems to really love citing it when talking to other journalists but I wasn't having luck turning up the original article itself. -- asilvering (talk) 15:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Keep. The sources, including those provided above, clearly demonstrate subject notability, satisfying WP:GNG, WP:NAUTHOR and WP:NWRITER. Shawn Teller (talk) 04:15, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep - needs major work, particularly regarding the use of primary sources, but the article's subject clearly passes WP:WRITER and WP:GNG. I don't think the problems are severe enough to justify WP:TNT, though I can certainly see the argument for it. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 17:55, 1 March 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.