Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Josiah Cantrall

I nominated this page for deletion as it fails to meet even basic notability guidelines. Mrfeek (talk) 00:49, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Strong Delete: There are 18 references on the Cantrall entry. One is the subject’s Facebook, one is his LinkedIn, three are bios from websites he blogs at and two are bios from the Wisconsin/Washington County GOP. Five are labelled as YouTube links although one is actually hosted by Fox’s Red Eye. None of the YouTube videos have more than 5,000 views. One link is another self-published video interview at mefeedia and another interview video is a dead link to World News Network (proudly proclaiming over 50,000 new articles daily). One link is an announcement that Cantrall will be on S.E. Cupp’s show. And one link is to one of the subject’s own columns (also listed as one of his “publications” but link goes to a mirror site).

The two remaining links deal with how he “gained national recognition for his investigative reporting during the Wisconsin union protests in February 2011.” One of the two is at BigGovernment, which he lists as one of the places he writes for. At best, one out of eighteen references meets the WP:BASIC tenet of being independent from the subject.

Regarding that investigative reporting – Wikipedia is not a newspaper and Bio of Living Person based on a Single Event WP:BLP1E generally does not warrant a separate article (from the Single Event). Further, the notability of his actual reporting is questionable at best. While the Wisconsin Teacher’s Union Strike was a notable event garnering substantive coverage in most major media outlets, asserted notability relates to only a single small aspect of the strike – the “fake” doctors’ notes. Additionally, Cantrall is not the only one to report on these notes on the day in question. Here is a link from The Atlantic featuring Cantrall’s video and three others as well. One of the other videos has nearly ten times the number of YouTube views as Cantrall’s. The “national recognition” being asserted is not demonstrated by the references. A Google News search for “Josiah Cantrall” covering the time period in question turns up a single hit – a mention in the county daily newspaper (The Waukesha Freeman, with circulation numbers around 12K).

The subsection titled “Controversy” has problems with WP:NPOV. More than half of the section is a direct quote from the subject and he is relating an anecdote that is frankly, very difficult to believe. Wikipedia is not a soapbox. The anecdote is also related to his single event and presents Josiah as undertaking intrepid undercover reporting (which is also seen in the tone of his video) and yet others who covered the same issue on the same day clearly show that the practice with the doctors’ notes was already widely known and not being concealed by the participants.

Note that the Cantrall page hyperlinks “Washington Times” when listing Cantrall’s “places he writes for.” BUT, he doesn’t actually write for the Washington Times – he writes for “Washington Times Community” which appears to be their blogging platform. By that measure, you can probably claim affiliation with Google due to being a Contributor at a site hosted by Blogger.

Finally, the original author looks very much like a WP:SPA. The article was marked WP:PROD two weeks after original authorship, then the original author removed tag and left no explanation in the talk page explaining why. This resulted in Mrfeek adding back the WP:PROD tag, though this was not proper procedure, resulting in the current WP:AfD – JMax555 (talk) 00:08, 8 November 2011 (UTC)