Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alt.atheism (3rd nomination)

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 was keep. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 00:01, 27 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Alt.atheism

Non-notable newsgroup, no sources found. Tagged as unreferenced since July 08. First AFD was kept by means of "It's notable!" !votes, second was no consensus with most keepers again arguing for notability without any sources coming up. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Many otters • One bat • One hammer)} 02:15, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

~~Delete~~ I have joined in the discussion there but without sources it can not be WP:Notable. Steve Dufour (talk) 02:30, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per Steve Dufour's findings of insufficient sources to establish notability and for verifiability. There are over 260,000 G-hits and so we cannot say with 100% certainty that sources do not exist but it is up to the authors to use them in creating an article in the first place. Drawn Some (talk) 02:57, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Steve Dufour changed his vote to a Keep below, and in an AfD it's about the subject moreso than the article. -- samj _in ^out 17:07, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Weak keep. To what extent has nominator actually looked for sources? Vanilla Google is hopeless, I'm sure, but Google news has 29 stories about it (at least one of them quite nontrivial, though it's in a student newspaper, the OSU Lantern) and Google scholar has 341 articles that mention it. Many of these, no doubt, are trivial mentions (including it in large numbers of other usenet groups) but I suspect some are not. Sproull and Faraj 1997, for instance (the second Google scholar hit) gives some detailed statistics for it as one of six sample groups in a table on page 44. There seems to be some nontrivial discussion in "Practicing religion in the age of the media: explorations in media, religion, and culture" by Stewart M. Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark (2002, ISBN 9780231120890) somewhere around pages 282-283 but I can't tell for sure because they're outside the Google books free preview zone. Kinney, Futures, 1995, DOI:10.1016/0016-3287(95)80007-V lists it as "top five in terms of volume". So I suspect it may very well be possible to improve this to a properly sourced article. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:06, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If so I will change my vote to Keep. In my heart I know that alt.atheism is notable, I just can't prove it. ;-) Steve Dufour (talk) 05:31, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral. I want to believe, because the FAQ hints that the group is notable, but I think we need some less recursive references. --Dennis The Tiger (Rawr and stuff) 16:53, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep a famous newsgroup, and what David E has found is sufficient to justify keeping it. DGG (talk) 03:55, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I checked back on the article hoping to be able to change my vote. It still has no sources whatsoever. Where is the stuff that David E found? Steve Dufour (talk) 16:37, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

They were in my comment above, not in the article itself, but I just added four of them to the article. The Kinney one is stronger than my comment above makes it appear: they surveyed 70 religion-related usenet groups and found that alt.atheism was the highest-volume among them. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:23, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep (change from previous vote). Thanks David. It seems to be sourced well enough now. No problem to keep. Steve Dufour (talk) 02:07, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, verifiably notable. If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again eh? -- samj _in ^out 17:04, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Atheism-related deletion discussions. —Tothwolf (talk) 22:04, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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.