# Talk:Fred Vehmeier

Much of the article is still based on things like vital records, wedding announcements, student newspapers (never independent, rarely RS), a police blotter, raw statistics, PR from his own college, criminal proceedings related to wife abandonment (not actually discussed in the article) etc. Nearly 100% of the material from before and after he was a coach is from such sources or from utterly trivial hyperlocal "news-around-town" items like "Fred Vehmeier, Jr., who is attending school in Dixon, spent Saturday and Sunday at home." There isn't a single source demonstrating he received any notice outside of the towns he lived in or outside of the two months he was the coach of a small university that wouldn't even join the NCAA for another 10 years, wouldn't join the College Division/D-II for 40 years, and wouldn't become D-I FCS for another 100 years.
Of the material that isn't objectively trivial/non-independent, the plurality derives from brief blurbs--a laudatory hiring announcement, routine recaps of the five matches under his tenure, and other run-of-the-mill contemporaneous news--over a two month period in one tiny local newspaper. We know that several of the reporters for that newspaper--including one author cited in the article--during and around that time were simultaneously students of the college he coached at, and several more had been students there at some point prior, so we don't even have a guarantee that the regular sports reporter at the Grand Forks Herald was actually independent. 
To comply with NPOV, the article needs to drastically reduce the routine trivia and flowery content sourced to approbatory news articles from overtly biased hyperlocal newspapers. JoelleJay (talk) 00:42, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Could someone explain how this article meets notability criteria. It seems so insignifiant that I  though it was a joke.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by BobBadg (talk • contribs) 18:57, 12 October 2023 (UTC) 

Vehmeier was the head coach of a team that's now a Division I football program, has several decent pieces of coverage (WP:NBASIC/WP:GNG), and was previously brought to AFD, where there was no consensus to delete. BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:00, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
...for 4 games, in 1912. This is trivia. BobBadg (talk) 21:10, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
What matters is that he has sufficient coverage to pass WP:NBASIC, which allows articles to be kept if they can be improved to a decent size by combining sources (and this clearly passes considering that there was enough to develop this into a good article); the fact that he coached what is now a Division I football program only adds to his notability. BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:23, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
"Division I football" - means nothing, I would suggest,  to anyone outside the USA.  In the UK, for instance, it would mean that the team played in the highest level of professional soccer. But this article refers to an amateur college team, that played other regional teams (was it  even in a league at that time?). I can see how this article would be of great interest to fans  of the history of American Football,  and from that point of view it is an interesting and well-researched bit of trivia.  For everyone else (i.e. the vast majority of English speakers globally),it's the sort of thing that makes Wikipedia an irrelevant joke rather than a serious attempt at being an encyclopedia. BobBadg (talk) 05:30, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
The thing is, the US is one of the largest and most influential countries in the world, so you can't say that "Vehmeier is from the U.S. and only known there so that means he can't have an article" - in fact, its ridiculous to suggest that any topic should be removed because its from a certain country. But we're getting besides the point - what matters is that he passes the relevant notability criteria. BeanieFan11 (talk) 12:50, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
Two points: (1) of course the US is important, but the point is that American Football isn't that important a sport globally; for instance,  in the Wikipedia article on Sport it doesn't make the top 10 in terms of popularity. (2) The notability criteria state '...Wikipedia's concept of notability applies this basic standard to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics. Article and list topics must be notable, or "worthy of notice"'. This article is a good example of such indiscriminate inclusion, as it just isn't 'worthy of notice' except to an exceedingly specialist readership. BobBadg (talk) 10:14, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
Two points: (1) of course the US is important, but American Football isn't that important a sport globally (I realise that this is difficult for Americans to  comprehend) - in the Wikipedia article on Sport it doesn't make the top 10 in terms of popularity. (2) The notability criteria state '...Wikipedia's concept of notability applies this basic standard to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics. Article and list topics must be notable, or "worthy of notice"'. BobBadg (talk) 10:14, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
Suggesting that a sport enormously popular that receives extensive coverage should not have their figures receive Wikipedia articles – even when those figures pass WP:GNG and WP:NBASIC (which, actually, are the only things that matter here) – because the sport is not globally popular (just in a few major countries like US/Canada...) is ... ridiculous. BeanieFan11 (talk) 13:56, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
In fact, your arguments that American football is not globally popular is completely irrelevant as the notability guidelines do not say anywhere that "those not from the most well-known sports do not receive articles". BeanieFan11 (talk) 13:58, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
QED BobBadg (talk) 15:54, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the image is of the right guy. It doesn't look like the Fred Eldon Vehmeier pictured in a U of Illinois yearbook and at FamilySearch.
I suspect that the photo in question is from the 1870s, before Vehmeier was born. Note that the original uncropped photo from FindaGrave is captioned "Ormsby, Chicago". Other antique photographs with this caption, printed in the same font, have an address on the back: 309 West Madison St., Chicago.[1][2][3] This address corresponds to the studio of photographer Elon D. Ormsby, who worked in California for most of his career and was in Chicago for only a few years in the 1870s.[4] -- T. Cadwallader Phloog (talk) 21:51, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

@T. Cadwallader Phloog: Oh no... ugh - I guess I see why Find a Grave is not reliable (and it really sounded accurate from what the uploading user said...). Thanks for your research - I guess I'll swap it out with the yearbook photo. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:06, 12 October 2023 (UTC)