Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Brian Salmi
This is indeed a long and rambling article — I'm only ''mildly'' exaggerating when I say it comes close to documenting each and every individual time Salmi ever ''sneezed''. It's so absurdly long, in fact, that it pulls off the truly impressive trick of citing 83 footnotes and yet still somehow featuring incredibly long passages of ''completely'' unreferenced text — in far too many places, as well, it doesn't just describe what he did, but delves into directly quoting everything he or somebody else said about it verbatim, which is not how you write about people's activities in an encyclopedic manner.Yet, in all this length and detail, what it ''fails'' to do is demonstrate that any of his activities were encyclopedically noteworthy: attending city council meetings to lobby for a city to declare itself a nuclear-free zone is not a notability claim; activity in student government is not a notability claim; being a non-winning fringe party candidate for political office is not a notability claim; writing opinion pieces for hyperlocal community weekly newspapers is not a notability claim; and on and so forth. If he just recently wrote and published a book, even that isn't an instant notability freebie either — passing  is a matter of winning major literary ''awards'' and/or showing evidence of noteworthy literary critics reviewing the book in media, not just of stating that the book exists — but the book is almost certainly the reason why after 35 years of activity this article is suddenly happening ''now'': this is almost certainly an |advertorial attempt by either Salmi himself or his publisher to boost his public profile and sell more books by misusing Wikipedia as a publicity platform.As for , that isn't just a matter of counting up the footnotes and keeping anything that surpasses a certain arbitrary number: |reference bombing is a thing, and it's a thing this article is definitely guilty of. Among these 83 footnotes, I count far too many tabloid newspapers, community and neighbourhood hyperlocals, "quote of the day" sidebars and glancing namechecks of his existence in articles which aren't ''about him'' to any non-trivial degree, none of which are types of sourcing that constitute support for notability — and once you discount all of those, the relatively few remaining sources that are actually about him to any non-trivial degree are purely local coverage in the Vancouver dailies in non-notable contexts. The notability test is not just "anybody who's gotten their name into the media X number of times for any reason whatsoever" — it tests the sources for their type and depth and geographic range, and for the ''context'' of what they're covering the subject ''for'', so it is entirely possible for a person with 83 footnotes to still fail GNG even as a person with just two or three footnotes passes it.Publicity-seeking is not how you get a person into an encyclopedia — and even if he actually ''were'' notable, this article is so badly written that it would still have to be |blown up and restarted from scratch anyway
— User:Bearcat, 13:16, 24 July 2019 (UTC)
Stance: delete
Cited policy: WP:AUTHOR||WP:NOTADVERT||WP:GNG||WP:REFBOMB||WP:TNT (Wikipedia:Notability)