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. (non-admin closure) Erik9 (talk) 19:24, 12 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

National Punctuation Day

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National Punctuation Day (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)
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Failed prod. Appears to fail WP:NOTE. Coverage in reliable sources seems to be blurbs or short bits not precisely rising to the level of "significant coverage"; lots of reproductions of PR releases. "Holiday" is a mere five years old, part of a literacy campaign from a former editor named Jeff Rubin (not Jeff Rubin), and not garnering the kind of coverage one would expect from a notable event. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 12:59, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment: Again, none of the sources contain significant coverage. It's like the story about a boy who got rescued from an alligator's stomach, but doesn't get his own article. Sure, it's covered all over the place, but not in a non-trivial way. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 15:56, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
You dont think this is significant They’re ‘passionate’ about punctuation?, there is more like this one in the 86 sources you failed to find in your search.--J.Mundo (talk) 16:08, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
No, in fact, I don't think it is significant at all. The holiday gets one mention in the beginning of the article, which then goes on to talk almost exclusively about "The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks", written by Bethany Keeley, a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia. They don't interview the creator of the holiday, expound on the "widespread-ness" of it, or anything else at all, for that matter. It's probably about as trivial as you can get! - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 16:18, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't sound like he wants to keep the article. Mandsford (talk) 15:01, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read, this is just a simple discussion to determine if we have enough coverage to meet WP:N and not a meta discussion about the sad state of media reporting.--Jmundo (talk) 15:48, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"Enough coverage" is an interesting concept. Does "enough" mean quantity is valued over quality? This is garbage reporting, but we've got a lot of said garbage. So everything is A-OK? This deletion debate interests me because it is one of the best examples I've seen where the notability-through-sourcing issue and the inane quality of media reporting are brought head-to-head. For instance, the press coverage is little more than regurgitation of self-publicity, which we would probably reject as "trivial". But perhaps there is that wee bit more added to it by the journalists involved - it's not just the virtually verbatim reprint of a press release, a spacefilling technique that takes up a significant proportion of a typical modern newspaper. You could feasibly keep this on the grounds of existence of multiple independent sources. I'm tempted to argue that since all sources are just restating what comes from the "NPD movement" (such as it is), they're effectively not independent - but I don't think that's quite true, because the published stories aren't identical. In short, I am at a loss what to do in a case where multiple sources exist and are arguably non-trivial, but are essentially utter pap. I think the best pro-deletion argument in this case has not actually been explicitly written yet. National Punctuation Day is essentially not a calendar event in the same sense as Veterans Day or Easter Sunday or a national No Smoking Day; it is basically a very small pressure group, and fails our appropriate notability standard (WP:GROUP) by some way. Unfortunately the bit it clearly fails by is the WP:CLUB subsection (which smells distinctly applicable to me); however, there is also the possibility of notability-by-sourcing being met. Are these sources genuinely "independent of the subject" if at heart they are just spewed out self-publicity? Are they genuinely "significant coverage"? I think that is a very tight call. I don't like the idea of this article passing our sourcing criteria - it is perfectly clear that the membership behind NPD is both very small yet very good at self-publicity. Their global or local impact is clearly trivial - getting the press coverage they do is virtually their raison d'etre (it's essentially an awareness-raising campaign, NPD is just a gimmick to get stories about punctuation into papers). I'd rest easier if secondary sources that merely requote primary sources or include a softball interview (which is basically just another way to quote primary sources) were excluded as "non-significant coverage" in our notability guidelines, but they're not. As a result, I don't feel I can give a good faith "delete" !vote, since I'm worried that it would be more WP:IDONTLIKEIT than a fair application of our guidelines to a borderline case. To me this feels like it should be a pretty clear-cut delete, and therefore there is surely a problem with the guidelines if it isn't. Yet I've not seen a knock-out pro-delete argument so far. TheGrappler (talk) 22:13, 9 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: "Didn't have time to read" what? Did you read any of the multiple sources generated by your Google search? Please do; you'll see that the coverages in each of them hardly constitute "significant" coverage. Each item is a fluff piece, meant to fill space not sold to advertisers in the print editions. Keep in mind, also, that the promotor of this particular holiday is a journalist himself, capable of using the right contacts to inflate an article count. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 13:38, 10 August 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.
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