Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Valery Meladze


 * 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. Even one of the delete !votes admitted he was notable in the pst, and there is clear sourcing that he has won what seem to be major awards  DGG ( talk ) 03:00, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Valery Meladze

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BLP flagged as unsourced since January, musician of no obvious encyclopaedic notability. Guy (Help!) 18:45, 22 March 2010 (UTC)  Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 01:28, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete Non-notable musician with an unsourced and unreferenced article. Pemberton08 (talk) 19:25, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep. I think the article just needs some improvement. He is more popular among Russian-speaking public, but there are several notable English venues mentioning him, like AOL, profiles at IMDb and Last FM or Upcoming.yahoo.com. Brand[t] 20:14, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Bands and musicians-related deletion discussions.  —  D OOMSDAYER 520  (Talk|Contribs) 20:31, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Music-related deletion discussions.  -- Cyber cobra  (talk) 20:37, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep. The person has MTV Russia Music Awards and a number of Muz TV awards. And he's also a Meritorious Artist of Russia, a very high honorary tittle awarded directly by the President. So the person undoubtly satisfies Wikipedia criteria of notability. There are lots of sources about him, and the only problem is that most of them would be in Russian or Georgian. Garret Beaumain (talk) 16:20, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.

 Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,   A rbitrarily 0    ( talk ) 00:53, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment. These potential sources should be taken into account: . I'm going to bed now, so I don't have the time or the inclination at the moment to get my head round a language that I haven't used in anger for over thirty years, but I would request that this shouldn't be deleted in the next 48 hours to give me a chance to check through those thousands of sources. Phil Bridger (talk) 23:14, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Russia-related deletion discussions.  —Phil Bridger (talk) 23:14, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.


 * Delete. He was big fifteen years ago - missed internet boom by a few years - so there's no independent sources online. Tons of promotional waste, half of youtube but very little reliable data. NVO (talk) 08:01, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
 * It seems a bit strange to dismiss him as having peaked 15 years ago when he won major music awards in 2004 and 2006. Since you seem to be stating this as a matter of fact rather than opinion, can you justify your claim? If he is indeed on "half of YouTube" this suggests that he is rather more popular than you imply. Brumel (talk) 19:35, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Verifiability, not truth. Can this BLP be sourced to reliable independent sources. No? Sorry, he will go the way of Victor Zinchuk. It's not a question of real-life notability? It's a question of sourcing per WP:BLP. Yes, he was big in 1995. But there's no reliable airplay data to prove it. At best wikipedia will have to resort to cheap Russian rags like MK, and even its web archive goes back only to 2005. NVO (talk) 12:34, 7 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. As a former professional musician and present amateur student of Eastern European popular music I have found the article very valuable. Even bearing in mind that it could possibly be unreliable, it has led me to several fruitful investigations. In fact I only discovered that it was being considered for deletion because I actually wanted to consult it on something.

Moreover, it seems to me that while Valery Meladze is fully deserving of an article in his own right (as explained by Garret Beaumain above), he is also valuable as a proxy for his brother Konstantin Meladze, who is in my view an even more notable figure and who lacks any Wikipedia article at all. IMO Konstantin Meladze is a composer on the same level as Ulvaeus & Andersson of ABBA or as Xenomania in the present day, both of whom rightly have Wikipedia entries. He used/uses Valery and VIA Gra as his primary outlets in much the same way as Ulvaeus & Andersson used ABBA and Xenomania uses Girls Aloud. I might possibly find it acceptable to remove the article on Valery Meladze if it were merged into a larger article on Konstantin, but in the absence of such an article it seems to me particularly important that the article on Valery should be retained, and in any case it would be better to have separate articles on each of them.

The problems with the article on Valery are that it is obviously written by a non-English speaker, it lacks references and it is sometimes confusing, though not inaccurate so far as I can tell. (For instance, it refers to both the group VIA Gra (correct capitalisation) and the group Nu Virgos, without explaining that they are the same group going under different names in different countries to avoid trademark infringement.) I don't know anything about how this is done, but would it be possible for someone to contact the original writer and persuade him/her to add references, even if they are to originals in languages other than English?

While it seems acceptable for Wikipedia to be flooded with entries for minor American R&B singers, there is a remarkable absence of entries for far more notable musicians from outside the USA, and particularly from Eastern Europe. Wikipedia should avoid becoming culture-bound. Brumel (talk) 10:17, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep per the clear notability as a major star in his country, but certainly not as a proxy for his brother. If Konstantin is notable then we can have an article about him - this article is about Valery. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:00, 7 April 2010 (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.