Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Uytae Lee


 * 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. Missvain (talk) 20:34, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Uytae Lee

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Semi-advertorialized WP:BLP of a journalist, not reliably sourced as passing our notability criteria for journalists. The overwhelming majority of the footnotes are just his own bylined work metaverifying its own existence on YouTube or media outlets he produced work for -- but as always, the notability test for a journalist is not just the ability to use his own work as circular verification that his own work exists, and instead requires the ability to use sources where he's been the subject of media coverage created by other people, to establish that his work has been externally validated as significant. But the most GNG-worthy sources here (The Tyee and CTV Atlantic) both just glancingly namecheck his existence within coverage of other things, and the only source that's about him in any non-trivial sense is a 113-word blurb in a listicle in a very minor magazine, none of which adds up to enough coverage about him to get him over WP:GNG. As usual, Wikipedia is not a free LinkedIn alternative where people are automatically entitled to have articles just because they exist -- nothing stated here is "inherently" notable enough to exempt Uytae Lee from having to have a much stronger notability claim, and much better sourcing for it, than anything shown here. Bearcat (talk) 16:34, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Journalism-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 16:34, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 16:34, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I think it would be a mistake to delete this article, I was inspired to write this after watching an interview with him so maybe I didn't convey enough things, I didn't want it to sound promotional. He's more of an advocate than a journalist as all of his work is editorialized opinion pieces. He does things on contract as outlined in this interview: | on another Channel. He's a pioneer with the format and the highest profile Canadian urban planner on YouTube. As the founder of PLANifax which is an established and staffed educational non-profit he has had a lasting impact beyond his regularly ongoing advocacy and journalism work. --TheJoyMonger (talk) 20:20, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
 * For one thing, you can never use YouTube content as "evidence" of notability at all — notability requires a certain specific type of reliable source coverage about him in a certain specific tier of high-quality media outlets, not just any web page you can find that has his name in it — and for another, notability also cannot be supported by Q&A interviews in which he's doing the talking, about himself or something else, in the first person. (Interviews can be sparingly used to source facts, but not as prima facie evidence of notability per se.) Notability requires real media outlets to be externally discussing and analyzing the significance of his work in the third person, and just asserting that he's "the highest profile" anything, or that his work "has had a lasting impact", doesn't count as a notability claim if you haven't used the correct kind of sourcing to demonstrate how those things are true. The problem is that as an encyclopedia that anybody can edit, there's nothing actually stopping any article from being filled entirely with lies and promotional braggadocio — so notability isn't measured by what the article says, it's measured by the quality and depth and reliability of the sources that the article does or doesn't use to support the things it says. Bearcat (talk) 11:44, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

OK it's been a bit of work but I've added in and reformatted around the two organizations he has founded as well as finding sources outside of the state broadcaster who contract him. Yes, I haven't used YouTube as a reference in the article for a reason. It's just everything he says in the video is backed by the public information I've found. TheJoyMonger (talk) 17:12, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
 * No, you completely missed the point. The new sources you added still aren't media coverage about him, but the self-published websites of organizations he's directly affiliated with. For example, speaking on a panel at a film festival does not help to make him notable if your source for that panel is the film festival's own website about itself — it only helps to make him notable if a media outlet writes a news story about the panel to help establish why it might have been significant. No matter what he does or doesn't do, it's the same: the notability test is not passed by using primary sources to verify that he did the thing, it's passed by using journalistic coverage about the things he did to verify that his work has been independently seen as significant by people other than himself and the organizations he did stuff for. Bearcat (talk) 12:45, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

He doesn't work for the Toronto International Film Festival, or the Tyee, or CTV, or this | Argentinian radio station. It's literally journalistic coverage about what he did, what he does is make urbanism videos. I'm a volunteer trying to create my first article here about someone who is (in my field) genuinely influential and you've been so uncollaborative and frankly rude. In that way, that an anonymous person with moderator status gets to be. I get that you're making an argument, but I reject it. I think your dismissing valid sources and making it seem like the article pivots on Primary Sources, when they are simply there to illustrate that he makes videos about certain topics and has produced videos for major sources. I don't think that you would take anything short of a New York times article called "How Uytae Lee shook the foundations of Urbanism in Halifax" which, isn't the sort of coverage that a Canadian gets. We just don't have that many news organizations, if you create organizations that partner with news outlets, you're not going to get much beyond primary sources in Canada. I'm just going to go through and setup internet archive links so that if you delete my work, at least when it gets re-created again some day there will be something to work off of. TheJoyMonger (talk) 05:03, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Firstly, there isn't a Toronto International Film Festival citation present in the article at all — there's a citation to Reel Asian, which isn't the same thing. But regardless, content self-published by film festivals to their own websites does not count as notability-supporting coverage — people are not automatically notable just because they spoke at a film festival discussion panel sourced to that film festival's own self-published calendar listing of that panel, if journalistic coverage about that panel cannot be shown to establish the panel's significance.
 * Secondly, that Argentinian radio station link is not coverage about Uytae Lee, it just briefly namechecks Uytae Lee as a giver of soundbite in an article about something else — which is exactly the same reason why the Tyee and CTV sources aren't helping either. So I'd recommend that you learn the difference between coverage about a person, and coverage that mentions a person in the process of being fundamentally about something else. The first kind helps to support notability; the second kind does not.
 * Thirdly, Canada does not have a dearth of media outlets that can be used to support notability, such that we would need to create special Canadian-specific carve-outs from our rules about what is or isn't reliable or notability-supporting sourcing — we've got at least ten television networks (hint: don't forget to count the French ones) that produce news programming, two national talk radio networks that produce news programming, literally hundreds of reliable and widely distributed newspapers and magazines, and likely millions of published non-fiction books. So no, Canada doesn't need any special dispensation to use bad sources as support for notability, because "but we don't have any real media up here" is not even remotely true.
 * And finally, "collaboration" does not mean that I have to let you just do anything you want and cite any weaksauce sources you want, or that I'm shirking my responsibilities as a Wikipedian just because I'm not telling you the things you want to hear. We have rules about what is or isn't notability-building sourcing, and telling you that some sources aren't acceptable is neither "uncollaborative" nor "rude". Bearcat (talk) 12:23, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Eddie891 Talk Work 22:10, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete Doesn't seem to have won any Canadian awards or have many mentions in media of note, I would say he doesn't meet the criteria. Oaktree b (talk) 14:16, 29 April 2021 (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.