Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Brad Fraser
Yes, the article needs some improvement — but we judge notability based on whether suitable |reliable sources ''exist'', not on whether they're all already in the article or not, so even an inadequately sourced article is still kept if better sources are ''available'' to improve it with. It's been a few years since Fraser debuted a new play, so he doesn't have as much ''current'' coverage at the moment as he had five and ten and fifteen and twenty years ago, but he's an established major playwright and screenwriter who's won major notability-making awards and has plenty more coverage than editors have actually added to the article so far — just in ProQuest's "Canadian Newsstand" database ''alone'', he gets 2,071 hits dating all the way back to ''1982'', and that's just in one database that only covers major-market Canadian daily newspapers, and still misses all the stuff he received in mid-market papers, magazines, literary criticism journals, books, radio, television and American or British newspapers. Again, notability is based on the |existence of suitable sources, not the current quality of the article, and Fraser absolutely has more than enough of the correct kind of coverage to fix the problems here. We also, for the record, do not have any rule that the sourcing has to Google, either: we ''are'' allowed to cite print-only sources, such as the newspaper coverage he was already getting in 1982, regardless of whether we find it on Google or in a newspaper archiving database — and that's precisely the ''reason'' that some articles about notable people aren't sourced as well as they could be, because a lot of Wikipedians are lazy and just source to Google stuff instead of actually looking for the older coverage.This is also exactly why we have a  rule: before you nominate an inadequate article for deletion, the onus is on you to ''check'' whether better sources exist to ''repair'' the article with before you nominate it for deletion, and you obviously did no such thing if you didn't find 2,071 hits of coverage extending back over nearly 40 years. For current topics, like a writer who just published their debut book this year or a band who just put out their first album in 2018, Google indeed tells the story in and of itself — but for a person who's been around for 40 years and got over our notability bar on things he accomplished in the 1990s, you ''need'' to dig into archiving databases to determine whether they have the coverage or not rather than resting solely on Google
— User:Bearcat, 17:16, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
Stance: keep
Cited policy: WP:RS||WP:EXIST||WP:BEFORE (Wikipedia:Reliable sources)