Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gerard van Herk
To be fair, this was created at a very different time (2006) in Wikipedia's history, when our standards for the notability of musicians or academics were a lot less well-defined and a lot less dependent on |reliable sourcing than they are now — it used to be the case, for example, that primary source verification of a professor's existence on his university's own website, even if it couldn't make the article FA or GA by itself, was enough in and of itself to stave off ''deletion'' of the article. But that's not the rule anymore. On a ProQuest search, I get a grand total of 37 hits on his name, of which 30 are about the ''band'' and just include his name because he's a member of it — so he doesn't pass  on the basis of his musical career, because NMUSIC specifies that if a musician's coverage consists of having his existence namechecked in coverage that's fundamentally ''about'' his ''band'' rather than about him as an individual, then he gets a redirect to the band and not a standalone BLP (for example, in general the lead singer of a band is a lot more likely to satisfy the conditions if and when he releases a ''solo'' album — although there are obviously exceptions at the upper end of mainstream popular music fame, the ''general'' rule is that "lead singer of a band" does ''not'' automatically constitute grounds for a standalone BLP as a separate topic from the band for ''every'' lead singer of ''every'' band.)And of the just ''seven'' hits which are actually about him as a ''linguistics'' professor, I get three hits which are also just namechecks of his existence as a professor rather than being substantively about him, and four hits which are substantively enough about him to actually count for something toward notability but are actually just reprints of the same wire service article in four different newspapers — so per , all four of those combine as ''one'' data point toward , not four distinct ones. A Tier ''2'' Canada Research Chair is ''not'' realistically an automatic  pass by itself — as noted above the title represents "''potential'' to lead in his field" rather than "already a leader in his field", so Tier 2 simply can't get the same ''presumption'' of notability that Tier ''1'' would get. It just can't be an automatic inclusion freebie in the ''absence'' of enough reliable sourcing to pass GNG.Which, thus, sends us right back to NMUSIC: if he's not sufficiently notable for ''other'' things to qualify for a separate standalone BLP, then he gets a redirect to his band rather than a standalone BLP. And, in fact, the band's article ''already'' includes a small amount of content about the fact that he went on to become a linguistics prof, so it's not like we would even need to merge much of this as "new" content — the ''substance'' of what's here is ''already'' duplicated there as it is
— User:Bearcat, 16:12, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
Stance: merge
Cited policy: WP:RS||WP:NMUSIC||WP:REFBOMB||WP:GNG||WP:PROF (Wikipedia:Reliable sources)