Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mike Daisey
Thank you for the preceeding, Calton. It's regrettable that you presume I'd written my comment without doing what you helpfully inform us is '"research", people'. I did make the requisite appeal to the research tool of choice for scholarly writing these days—the search engine. I got online booksellers, blogs, ads and notices; even a dog training outfit. Many of these are no surprise: Mike Daisey has a play in print, ''21 Dog Years''. This explains many of the hits, in particular the booksellers and notices. You adduce a sample, and claim that they are sufficient to meet what I termed ''reputable sources... that may be used as a basis to write the article and satisfy the requirements of  and ''. I saw some of the things you've put up. The http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1119068 NPR link is a three sentence scheduling notice about ''21 Dog Years''. The http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/afternoonplay/pip/d7qiz/ BBC link is a similar 1 sentence scheduling notice about a play. This http://music.sfweekly.com/issues/2004-06-16/index.html SF link has a single sentence, about his play. In my search I had also found others of a similar nature: http://www.assemblyrooms.com/programme2003/prog_code/21DOG/programme_item.php Assembly Theatres programme item—1 sentence about the play. Now, when one writes an article—an ''encyclopedia'' article, how well do 1-sentence sources serve as reference works? How well do scheduling notices about plays serve as a basis to write an encyclopedic biographical article, in your opinion? You mention the number of google hits your searches produced. I have found that using the number of hits to indicate encyclopediability to be suboptimal suboptimal—what matters most is the quality of the references and sources with which you can write on the subject. Not the number of hits. Take, for example, the article on Hopkins syndrome. This is an exceptionally rare medical condition—many doctors go through their entire professional lives without having once heard of it. However, it is the subject of serious study and is perfectly encyclopedic. Our WP article is a summary of what is known about the condition; every claim in every sentence is verifiable in the references, all of which are of good quality. We'd be hard-pressed to put up an argument that that article in not suitable for WP. Yet, if you perform the much-vaunted google search, you'd get only some 250 odd links, of which many are duplicate copies of abstracts pulled off another site. Google hits are a suboptimal measure of encyclopediability. The numbers may coincide with encyclopediability, but they are not the crux of the matter; at the very best, they are merely what might be called a surrogate endpoint|surrogate measure.The crux is how solid an article can be written about the subject, per , , , . If the subject is a disease, are there excellent references that report what is known about its clinical features, pathology, etiology, epidemiology, natural course, possible treatments? If the subject is a ''person'', do we have references on ''them'' (ie. ''them'', not just reviews of their books or plays or theses)? The latter issue lies at the heart of this AFD, and perhaps we should discuss it further. I have noticed a curious difficulty many of us Wikipedians seem to have with biographical articles on writers (I think it has something to do with misunderstanding the relationship between  and ). If a person happens to have written a book, and there is available a review/critique of the book, there is immediately an (odd) assumption that a WP article can be written about the ''person'' (as opposed to the book). "John Brown has published a novel? Oh, we definitely should have an article on him, then." This is often said despite nothing ever having been written ''on or about'' John Brown, the subject of the proposed article. IMHO, this misunderstands how an encyclopedia article is written. An article on the subject "John Brown" can only be written per  and  if we have works ''on John Brown'', just as an article on asthma may only be written if there are publications on asthma. If all available acceptable sources pertain solely to John Brown's ''book'', one may write a good, NPOV article on the book, but unless one wishes to break , the author page should not be more than a redirect. Consider as an example the article Bertrand Russell. The reason we were able to write that article on WP is that there is a rich trove of works on Russell, the person: Ray Monk's famous two-volume biography, AJ Ayer's work on Russell, Clark's—even Russell himself wrote a three volume autobiography and numerous papers on his own life and convictions. We have libraries-worth of works on his works, his philosophy, his mathematics. So when we put together the article, including in it those features that one would expect to find in a biographical account, we have rich sources from which to write and verify. When we say "Russell was born on May 18, 1872", we can ''verify'' that, easily. When we write "He was born in Wales into an aristocratic family", we can ''verify'' that. When we say that his father was so and so, his mother had an affair with so and so, his siblings were so and so, his adolescence was lonely, he attended Trinity on scholarship, his influences were Whitehead, Moore, Hume; he married so and so, he taught at XYZ, he was forced to leave City College because of controversy, he won the Noble Prize in Literature... every such claim is ''verifiable from excellent sources''. And then of course we have the works on his philosophy and thought, his politics, his professional life... For the opposite situation, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Balagangadhara|this AFD for an example of a case where there were a lot of sources on the writer's work, but absolutely nothing on the person. With Mike Daisey, the "references" I found were
— NONE, NONE
Stance: comment
Cited policy: WP:V||WP:RS||WP:V||WP:RS||WP:NOR||WP:NOT||WP:BIO||WP:V||WP:NOR||WP:V||WP:NOR (Wikipedia:Verifiability)