Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Review

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was delete. —Cleared as filed. 00:46, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

The Review

This article should be deleted because it is a school club, and therefore is not in accordance with wikipedia's guidelines for publishing. Mysticfeline 15:14, 1 December 2005 (UTC)mysticfeline

• This afd nomination was orphaned. Listing now. —Crypticbot (operator) 15:39, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Per nom. --StuffOfInterest 19:24, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
• Comment Do we have precedent re student newspapers? They claim to have won awards; some verification of that would help establish a claim for relevance. —Matthew Brown (T:C) 20:12, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
• Wikipedia doesn't exclude school clubs per se, any more than it excludes any other sorts of clubs per se. We aim to be more sophisticated than that.

  The first test that an article's subject has to pass is that of verifiability. The simple existence of this newspaper is verifiable, as the school's own web site lists it as one of two newspapers. The second test that an article's subject has to pass is notability, whether the world at large has taken note of the subject, and the best litmus test for that is whether anyone else, independent of the subject, has found it notable enough to go to the trouble of creating some sort of non-trivial published work of their own (such as a book, a magazine feature, a paper published in a journal, or a television documentary, for examples) focussing on it. This newspaper fails that test. Researching, I cannot find anything written about this newspaper that isn't sourced directly from the newspaper itself. (Information about the newspaper from the newspaper suffers from the same non-neutrality, non-verifiability, and original research concerns that all autobiographies suffer from.) It's only other mentions anywhere are incidental and so minor as to provide no useful information about the newspaper itself (such as mentions in a list of awards to student journalists that lists the school newspaper that each works for). If someone else had, say, published a book entitled The Review: 1946–2005: A history of student journalism at St John's School, the newspaper would have passed the test. But there's no evidence that anything like that exists.

  Having multiple, independent, reliable, sources is as much a part of good encyclopaedism as it is of good journalism. Delete. Uncle G 20:59, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

• Delete per Uncle G. An example of the article's unreliability: it claims that the paper itself has won "numerous awards" from the CSPA, but the only facts I can find boil down to this - one award from the CSPA, one of literally hundreds made in 1996 alone, and awarded to a student journalist for a single article published in the paper, not to the paper itself. — Haeleth Talk 22:30, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete per Uncle G, non-notable. Jtmichcock 02:12, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
• We can assure you that The Review has won many awards from the CSPA and the San Jacinto College Journalism Day. While we cannot find any references to the San Jacinto competition online for verification purposes, we can post some pictures of the certificates if necessary. The assertion that we overstated the number of awards won from the CSPA is false. We have won several CSPA awards in the past couple years alone. Again, while we cannot find any verification of this online, we have certificates that we could scan online. The poster also mentions that the award was given to an individual staffer and not the paper itself. The Review has won several awards for overall paper and front page layout.

  Our paper has hundreds of subscribers nationwide, and annually we sell bound copies of the year's issues. We have been a source for reliable, relevant, and provocative journalism since 1946. Certainly The Review deserves an entry.

  Sincerely,

  The editorial staff of The Review

  • Wikipedia is not in the business of taking articles subjects' own words for things, for the reasons that I gave above. For all we know, you could have dummied up the pictures of your certificates in Photoshop. Information about the newspaper must come from sources that are independent of the newspaper. Uncle G 02:00, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
• DO NOT Delete Obviously private college preparatory intsitutes are relevant to wikipedia's purposes, as hundreds of legitimate articles have been written on these institutes. The poster clearly has limited knowledge of Wikipedia's policies. The entry should stand.
  • You have just made an argument about the institute, not about the newspaper, which is the subject under discussion here. Uncle G 02:00, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
• As a member of the school in question, I feel that the newspaper has always kept everyone up-to-date on new developments. Since we only have a literary magazine that mainly only focuses on poetry and a corrupt yearbook that only puts their own pictures in the yearbook, we need the newspaper to know what is really happening at our institution. In fact, the paper is better than many other high school papers that I have seen.
  • This discussion isn't about whether your newspaper should continue to exist. It is about whether there is enough independently sourced secondary source material about it to warrant an encyclopaedia article. If you want to make a case for that, please find magazine feature articles, newspaper articles, books, television documentaries, or other similar works that other people, independent from your newspaper itself, have published about it. Ask your teachers to help you, if you like.

    Don't be disappointed if you cannot find any. It just means that your newspaper is unknown to the world at large. In which case, suggest to your teachers the idea of writing a The Review: 1946–2005: A history of student journalism at St John's School article for your school's own web site. Uncle G 02:00, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

• Comment To those who doubt the validity of the paper's having won more than one CSPA awards: please see the main page, under "Awards." There are linked verifications of the awards listed. The user who noted that the paper won only one award in 1996 apparently and ironically did not look at more recent CSPA pages.

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.