Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Fish Information and Services (2nd nomination)

Arguments
Arguments are classified as Delete or Keep arguments. In compiling this Abd has bolded arguments which bear, in his opinion, on notability. This is a draft, but I'm getting frequent power failures here, local weather, and no harm in people seeing the draft. This section will be edited, and may even be completely rewritten. It's intended to be NPOV, so I'd appreciate edits to it, to improve it, rather than commments. I'll ask that comments go below, in the subsection for comments. Thanks. --Abd (talk) 18:33, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Delete

 * 1) Fails WP:CORP
 * 2) Does not meet WP:WEB
 * 3) potential WP:SPAM
 * 4) previous deletion discussion hijacked by proven sockpuppetry not enabling a fair discussion.
 * 5) the initial AfD included strong discussion by the prominent author (who clearly indicated a COI issue) and two other editors - all of whom have been identified and blocked as socks of each other.
 * 6) Whilst the article is abundantly referenced they are not third party references and do not provide verifiability.
 * 7) Being in business for 13 years, having 13 offices in seven countries and 60+ employees doesn't make it automatically notable.
 * 8) Library of Congress doesn't state the notability of the subject.
 * 9) The external sites included in the references are only passing mentions and do not meet the criterion that The content itself has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself .
 * 10) if it were important then it would presumably have references to support that notability.
 * 11) Sock puppetry has continued. There is a lack of non-trivial independent sources, WP:COI, spam, and sockpuppetry - a combination almost invariably absent where subjects are genuinely notable. If there had been reliable evidence of notability, Spindoctor69 would have provided it.
 * 12) FIS was not profitable in 2002 (date of article ref'd as Keep argument).

Keep

 * 1) The organisation is verifiable and notable.
 * 2) It has been in existence for 13 years, has offices in several countries and 60+ employees.
 * 3) The article is abundantly referenced.
 * 4) There are at least 4 reliable third-party sources independent of FI&S already cited in the article, among them the US Library of Congress, an accredited institution of higher education and a peak national industry body.
 * 5) Disruptive nomination. Out-of-process AfD. (This would be relevant to a speedy close, but ordinarily that is not done if there has been substantial comment. It may also be relevant to a DRV on this article.)
 * 6) Deliberately misleading comments.
 * 7) It's difficult to search for FIS, as the site is known in the industry, because the acronym is widely used.
 * 8) The site seems to get most of its traffic from non English speaking areas.
 * 9) It is a tool that insiders know about, rather than a site that is the subject of interest in the general media.
 * 10) Site shows activity from notable companies.
 * 11) Specific sources asserted.
 * 12) [http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2002/05/06/focus4.html bizjournals.com: 2002 article mostly about Pacific Fishing Magazine, owned by FIS or an FIS company, contains descriptions of FIS more than in passing.
 * 13) ZoomInfo.com
 * 14) People's Daily article on FIS. The Fish Information Services (FIS), [is] known as the world's largest fish-related information center...
 * 15) Support from expert Wikipedian/Admin (librarian) User:DGG
 * 16) Those of us involved professionally with providing or organizing information, tend to do so for others, and don't write much about ourselves. The article seems descriptive to me, not like an advertisement, and the sources show the importance. Whether they meet formal guidelines is secondary--the guidelines are guidelines intended to be flexible with exceptions, there';s no serious question that the actual key policy can be met, that the information can be verified. If something is clearly the major player in an important human activity, and we can get information, that's good reason enough for an article.
 * 17) 20 citations in Google Scholar.

Comments

 * Some of the points above are not arguments but are conclusions. For example, the first Fails WP:CORP does not tell us anything of the reasons why and so fails WP:VAGUEWAVE.  Some points may also have been invalidated by later additions to the article. Colonel Warden (talk) 18:59, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * That's correct. That's why the above is merely a first step in organizing what's happened so far with this AfD. This is *not* a compendium of "valid" or "complete" arguments. Just a summary of the arguments presented, absent the duplication of arguments, and also showing clearly irrelevant arguments (i.e., those not in bold as listed). (Abusive renom, for example, may be procedurally relevant in some sense or other, but has nothing to do with whether the topic is actually notable or not.) --Abd (talk) 20:19, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi - you have listed WP:SPAM - not in bold and therefore as irrelevant. I conclude then that you are dismissing the argument - notwithstanding the WP:SPA and his sockpuppetry - as not merely a public relations pieces designed to promote a company. I concur that regardless of the PR exercise, the failure against WP:CORP and WP:WEB is of way more significant, but I think the purpose for which the article was created is not insignificant.  A topic which is notable is created for a genuinely encyclopaedic purpose and I have no faith that this was created for an encyclopedic as opposed to advertising purpose.--Matilda talk 20:37, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes. We do not (or should not) judge author intention, except when considering sanctions against an author, which is not our task here. The author may have created the article for whatever purpose; however, that's history and not relevant to whether or not the topic is notable. If the article is written as promotion, but can be rewritten to be encyclopedic, we should rewrite, not delete. An article on a non-notable subject does not deserve a keep because it was written with intentions to improve the project, etc., and an article on a notable subject should not be deleted because an original author was a spammer, filled it full of copyvios, BLP violations, created an army of sock puppets to disrupt an AfD, or anything else. All those would cause us to doubt his good faith, but we rely upon independent verification to determine notability, not simply an assumption of good faith re the author. Nor does an article become notable because it was abusively renominated, because a nominator is a rabid deletionist, nor even if the nominator was actually a banned sock puppet, and neither is notability altered by incivility on the part of !voters.


 * In other words, the article may have been created for a non-encyclopedic purpose, but the creator does not own the article, the community does, and many editors have now researched the topic, some of whom have edited the article to remove objectionable aspects, supply sources, etc. I was appalled to see an editor change his !vote explicitly because of the sock puppetry; this would only be appropriate if the !voter were relying upon assertions from the editor, assuming good faith. It is as if the !voter were attempting to punish, by his !vote, the errant editor, or, perhaps, the company; both of these would be utterly improper. [After writing this, I noticed that this editor changed his vote back with an edit summary reinstate keep, since sockpuppet now seems under control, which simply continues the idea that sock puppetry was relevant. My purpose here is not to criticize that editor, but to address the problem of fallacious arguments.] As noted by the nominator here, distracting arguments from the first AfD have been introduced here, the SPAM argument was one of them.


 * Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions refers to Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions, and then there is a reference to Appeal to motive, which is on point here. The alleged motives of the author do not bear on the notability of the topic. Period. An apparent promotional motive may indeed inspire an AfD, because it causes a reviewer to question the neutrality of an author, but the author and the author's motives are not properly the subject of the AfD, serving only to impeach our standard presumption of good faith; however, we properly respond to this by removing unverified material from the article -- or the article itself if insufficient material can be verified for a stub or notability is not established. --Abd (talk) 02:27, 3 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, Abd, I am the editor who so "appalled" you, by spitting the dummy and changing his vote. At the time the sockpuppet was sabotaging my attempts to strip the muddying garbage he had added to the article. Another editor had, in all seriousness, enumerated these garbage "references" and sombrely pronounced on each of them. Then another editor had come in with what appeared to be a knee jerk "delete" on the basis of this, the debate lurching from one farce to another. In these conditions there seemed no point in continuing. Better to be done with it, delete the article now, and reestablish it later, hopefully with better references, and hopefully in a saner space. I might add that the sockpuppet did in fact seem to back off after I changed my vote. However, I do feel, Malilda, that you seem more oriented towards punishing the sockpuppet by rejecting the article, than oriented towards judging the article on it's own merits.


 * I confess I have difficulty with some of these administrative debates. They often seem to me very disruptive. I already spend up to an hour a day on a vandalism patrol around a certain project, yet it often feels like deletionists are more disruptive and waste more time than the vandals. My main current interest is trying to add, improve and protect worthwhile articles within the scope of the project. A while back, a school boy, with a great flurry of illogical wikilawyering, achieved the deletion of a category that was very useful and made it much easier to organise the project. Some deletionists seem like they are after trophies and blood on the floor rather than an equitable outcome. Then one starts to wonder if it's worth trying to improve Wikipedia. It does seem at times that there are administrators who contribute very little content to Wikipedia, and that they seem to have the upper hand over those who do contribute content. This seems deeply wrong to me. Well there we are. That's my grizzle of the moment. Maybe I should stop contributing content and just become a wikilawyer. --Geronimo20 (talk) 05:09, 3 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Of course. And I think you understand my point, and just made the !vote change out of frustration. But I'm not sure that you understand AfD process very well. Right now, I'd bet on Keep (probably through No Consensus, which is where it stood before the 2nd nomination, which I do consider improper, though not "abusive," i.e., it was, I assume, made in good faith; I think it was improper because the sock puppetry did not really influence the outcome of the first AfD, the arguments made with the renom don't seem well-grounded to me. There is some possibility, given the arguments and their timing (the best source, for example, appeared after most of the !Delete votes had been entered), for a Keep decision. If the article is deleted, and barring some major change in the flow of this AfD, I'd expect it has a good chance at Deletion Review to be reinstated, should someone take it there. AfD is an awful process, in my opinion, it needs major work; more editors get blocked and banned over AfD debates than almost anything else; we have a 2002 editor on a 30-day block over, essentially, his outrage over this AfD. I blame the process, not "deletionists" or, for that matter, "inclusionists." It is a setup for contention instead of cooperation and seeking consensus. --Abd (talk) 13:53, 3 October 2008 (UTC)