Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/William McCracken


 * 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 all. There's no place to merge, and if there were, the written material wouldn't be of any real help. Mango juice talk 14:44, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

William McCracken

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

Also nominating the following for essentially the same reason. All of these articles consist of only their coaching record obtained from one source where the mention of the coach is trivial and so fail notability requirements. I have left out those coaches with other assertions of notability and also the most recent coaches so as to try to make as much of an uniform discussion as possible. Please also see previous discussion at Articles for deletion/Walter J. West and ongoing discussion at Articles for deletion/Max Holm.

Dpmuk (talk) 18:38, 17 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete all. per Nom. Kittybrewster  &#9742;  19:07, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete all per nom Themfromspace (talk) 19:26, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete all: Articles share that all of them coached at an obscure Bible college that only this year started playing Division III NCAA football, far below the "highest level" threshold of amateur athletics, that WP:ATHLETE does not encompass coaches, and that no information seems available about any of them save that they coached at the school and what their won-loss records were.   RGTraynor  19:44, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Response--context! at the time he was the coach, the NCAA didn't even exist. Who cares what the school does now?  It's what did the team and the coach do then that matters.--Paul McDonald (talk) 01:36, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete All Division three coaches are not notable. No independant sources. -Djsasso (talk) 19:52, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Please Move Discussion All of a sudden, there are a large number of college football head coach articles being considered for deletion. There has always been a trickle--one or two at a time, but my current count shows 28 [Wikipedia:WikiProject College football#Articles & Pages being considered for deletion|articles for deletion]], and I'm sure I'm missing many.  One editor has achieved a deletion of Walter J. West and is now claiming "precedent" to delete coaches.  I suggest (and have been suggesting for some time now) moving these argument to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Notability so that we can have a uniform and open discussion about what truly makes a notable college football coach.  This will prevent arguing article-at-a-time and help to make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia.  It will prevent a "scramble" on both sides of the argument and make for a single place to come to a true consensus instead of a hit-or-miss end result.--Paul McDonald (talk) 01:54, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: People having general discussions is a good thing, and when and if WP:ATHLETE is amended to explicitly grant prima facie notability to coaches of even the lowest possible levels of college ball, of course we ought to rule on black letter policy.  RGTraynor  02:48, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Response I don't know how you think that having a notability essay "trumps" WP:N in any way, especially when the essay itself says that it doesn't. But even so, you are placing undue burden on the project team by spamming AfDs.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:05, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't, as it happens; you are the one who's been saying that yours does. As far as placing "undue burden on the project team," as far as I can tell, you're the only one from CFB going to much trouble to defend the articles.  If you personally feel burdened, might I humbly suggest that the process doesn't compel you to make as many as fifteen comments per AfD (as with West)?    RGTraynor  14:49, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Response To be fair, I'm (probably) the only one at present defending historical articles. In case you have not noticed, the 2008 college football season has begun.  Editors enthusastic about college football tend to, at this time, focus their efforts on gaining new photos and updating articles where current events are concerned.  Normally, the off-season is when historical articles are addressed by the project.--Paul McDonald (talk) 18:09, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. As far as I'm aware there's only three ways of deleting an article on Wikipedia - speedy, prod and AfD (see WP:DP) - and discussion on a project isn't one of these.  I don't think these articles are suitable for speedy and as prods were likely to be contested I thought that AfD was the right way to go.  I think the "precedent" is a good one given all the articles nominated are nearly identical in that they just consist of the coaches record followed by a statement of where that puts him in terms of coaches at that school.  The record comes from a single trivial, non-independent source while the ranking is verging on WP:OR.  This is exactly the same as the Waler J. West article so I think there is a precedent.  That said I never claimed it was a precedent and left that decison up to individual editors - I just pointed them at that AfD given the obvious similarities and to try to avoid having the same discussions again.  I also left out any coaches whose article was different to this format and more recent coaches as there are likely to be more references found for them (IMO I suspect still not enough to meet notability guidelines but probably enought to make the discussion different).  Personally I'd have been happy listing a hundred or more in a single AfD (I suspect there's that many) but a) I don't believe that number of articles has ever been done before in a single AfD and b) it would have made it very hard for other editors to check that I hadn't accidently included an article on a coach that was notable.  I fully intend to slowly list more coaches as I have time and when I think enough time has passed since the last batch (so as to avoid swamping editors).  Dpmuk (talk) 11:01, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: As it happens, when researching for the Thiel mass AfD, most of the seven coaches on whom I didn't file were relatively recent, although I chalk that up to that coaches moving to more prominent college posts is a lot more prevalent now, and the coach of Southern North Dakota at Hoople one year's winding up as the ten year incumbent at Michigan State twenty years down the road, establishing definite notability there.   RGTraynor  13:39, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Merge to the article about the college. I'm inclined to think that many college coaches are notable (never mind that they are not specifically enumerated as such at WP:ATHLETE), but these are people who coached at an obscure college, often for very brief periods, and had undistinguished records. They aren't notable, but some information about them could be merged into a sports history section in the college article. --Orlady (talk) 22:07, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Merge/Delete - I was going to suggest merging the information to Geneva College Golden Tornadoes but then found there is no article, only an article for the College itself. Maybe there should be an article for the team and the coaches listed within that article. But if the team itself fails notability...well, why are there articles on obscure coaches of that team? &bull; Florrie &bull; leave a note &bull; 23:38, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: Certainly such an article would be appropriate; we've got articles for semi-pro teams, come to that, and if one existed, a merger to it would suit, although the info on these coaches isn't there to support anything beyond a table.   RGTraynor  00:36, 20 September 2008 (UTC)


 * No problem please join the college football project and get started making team articles! But the non-existence of a team article doesn't make the coach article not notable.  Just as "other stuff exists" isn't a valid argument, "other stuff doesn't exist" also is not valid.  Wikipedia is far from complete.--Paul McDonald (talk) 01:36, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment - I have no interest in and no knowledge of college football, but I do have an interest in WP:N which is why I responded to your message at WP:RLT. You appear to have started quite a few of the listed articles (though I haven't looked at all of them). Not trying to teach you to suck eggs, but to me, it would be logical to start an encyclopedic series of entries from the top, with the league, then the club, then the players and lastly the coaches, etc, assuming they meet notability criteria. Just my opinion. &bull; Florrie &bull; leave a note &bull; 02:12, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Request As discussed on the AfD talk page, if this article (or any of the series of articles) is closed as a delete, please kindly first move the article to User:Paulmcdonald/Articlename, where "Articlename" is the name of the article (or articles) being removed. Also, please note the new page location at User:Paulmcdonald/deletedcoach so we can be sure to find the moved page.

Why? There have been, at present count, 58 articles of our project placed on the AfD list and there is just not enough time to adequately and appropriately respond and ultimately improve the articles themselves. This would give the project memebers time to work on improving the articles. This request should in no way imply that I believe that the article (or articles) in quesiton should be deleted at this time. I am making a simple cut-n-paste request due to the sheer volume of AfDs in such a short period of time.--Paul McDonald (talk) 01:02, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete all as lacking non-trivial coverage in reliable sources. Stifle (talk) 10:12, 22 September 2008 (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.