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.
Website appears to fail the notability guidelines. At first I believed the Infoshop sources would be sufficient, but they were written by the authors of Anarchist FAQ miserably botching WP:RSSELF Additionally, Infoshop itself is suspect to being an unreliable source since it does not name its contributors nor provide any form of verification, political partisanship aside. I attempted to find notability from many reliable sources and was unable to do so. All results pointed to their published books, none about the website itself. Jcmcc (Talk) 19:52, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A quick Google search for material citing *An Anarchist FAQ* on academia.edu shows numerous citations, of both the web project and published volumes, in mainstream academic publications by scholars respected within the field of Anarchist Studies. Libertatia (talk) 05:00, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sympathetic to the nom because my talk page comment on sourcing has gone unanswered since 2018. Absolutely true that it is often cited but also true that any significant discussion of the FAQ itself (as the subject) and its development from multiple reliable, independent sources (?) has eluded me for years. Even in relation to its publication and editing by McKay, there is little secondary source discussion of the FAQ, its editors, or its import. The brief lines mentioned in the article are passing mentions. Infoshop.org is not in itself a reliable source for statements of fact, but if the FAQ has strong association with the site, I considered a potential redirect to the Alternative Media Project but found no significant sources that discussed its connection. We can always restore the article if/when such sources appear. I also have an idea for a potential merge target but let's see if I can get it out of draft. czar19:13, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the Legacy paragraph points at the end seems convincing enough to warrant its stay here. Being called the "most influential" or "greatest" or "easiest" to something surely means enough for it to stay, no? --166.62.226.25 (talk) 01:24, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Draftify in order that the above non-!voters (with whom I'm in sympathy) can preserve the reasonably well-sourced existing content in the hopes of a more suitable form than a stand-alone article. An article on Iain McKay, or one on something like "anarchism and the internet" (the context in which it's discussed in the Owens and Palmer article) would be obvious merge targets, but neither exist. The only source I've been able to find that contains sufficiently in-depth coverage is Colin Barker and Laurence Cox's "What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?", which is a conference paper but is widely-cited and satisfies WP:EXPERTSPS. Another source like that would seal the deal, but nothing else seems to exist. So let's keep this around for the time being and see if anyone creates a sensible target to which it can be merged (or identifies one that's so far been missed), because sources exist for some sort of encyclopaedic coverage but also aren't sufficient for the FAQ to merit article in its own right. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 14:47, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: the AK Press version of this appears to pass WP:BKCRIT #1 of WP:NBOOK.[1][2]
That does complicate things. My sense is that judging this to be notable on that basis would require a WP:TNT approach or something similar. We can't have an article that's almost entirely about a website when the sources only indicate that the book version's notable. And that's assuming that the text is the same. But perhaps there's another solution I haven't thought about. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 19:43, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I wholeheartedly agree that if this article was about the book, it would solidly pass WP:BKCRIT. The problem is that this article is about the website. It would require an almost complete overhaul from it's current state. Jcmcc (Talk) 13:53, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Draftify. The article fails WP:WEBCRIT. The website has never won a well-known and independent award and it has not been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself. In its favor are a well written text and some promise of future notability, that's maybe alrteacy extant out there somewhere but which your humble servant could not locate and not for want of trying. So, one more try would be the generous move here. -The Gnome (talk) 11:54, 8 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Draftify would only work if we had sufficient sources and simply needed to rewrite it. In this case we acknowledge that the article is cobbled together from mentions in a variety of sources and that the only reviews are in specialist/partisan journals. That would not meet BKCRIT for any other publication. czar13:51, 8 April 2022 (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.