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. BD2412 T 04:03, 5 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Philipp Offenthaler[edit]

Philipp Offenthaler (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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I am fully aware that someone who plays in the 'Austrian second division football' is presumed notable under WP:NFOOTY, however, after searching for any sources I could add to the article, I'm not seeing any sources that can demonstrate notability in this case and am contesting the presumption of notability. The article was added with only links to stats pages at Soccarway and WorldFootball.net (not significant coverage), without any attempt to demonstrate the that the subject meets the general notability guideline (A practice all too common with low-level sportspeople).

I can't find any sources that have significant coverage of him at all.

The only mentions of him in the news that I can find are these: [1], [2], [3]. they don't even approach that is necessary to satisfy the GNG (one line mentions only). The only other sources online are a multitude of stats pages on aggregation sites, which also don't represent significant coverage. If anyone can actually find sources that demonstrate notability, I'm happy to withdraw this nomination. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 17:51, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Football-related deletion discussions. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 17:51, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sportspeople-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 18:09, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Austria-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 18:09, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in WikiProject Football's list of association football-related deletions.CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 00:43, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
GiantSnowman, Are you trying to imply that NFOOTY gives a presumption of future notability? That is a WP:CRYSTAL argument and you know it. GNG is not met, I’ve searched, so there is no longer any such presumption. Have you found anything? — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 19:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
No, it is a presumption of current notability. Not being able to find a glut of online sources in a foreign language is not the sole indicator. GiantSnowman 20:01, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
GiantSnowman, Then why did you point out "ongoing career". I'm not talking about requiring a 'glut'; there aren't any available. The whole point of the GNG is because we need sources with significant coverage to be able to say any more than "this guy exists". If there aren't any, he doesn't pass the GNG and we can't expand the article. Also, I would argue that your position would make a lot more sense presuming notability for a player from twenty years ago, as it would be more plausible that the sources would not be online. This guy is contemporary, in the internet age, where pretty much all news/coverage that would satisfy the GNG is posted online in some form or another (even regional newspaper coverage). As for foreign language; Google search works just as well in German as it does in English, so the foreign language argument doesn't hold much water with me (this might be different if he was Chinese or something). The sources just are not there, and there is no reason to presume that offline sources exist that are not available online for a contemporary sports figure of the internet age. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 22:49, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Please, continue to be aggressive, that will certainly help me change my mind. GiantSnowman 09:35, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
GiantSnowman, have you found any sources to support notability? As I said in the nomination, I'm happy to withdraw if anyone can find anything that can demonstrate that he meets the GNG. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 17:20, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Smartyllama, I would never claim that notability depends on whether the sources are in the article. You are 100% correct; question is "do sources exist". But based on the searches that I have done and that Levivich has done, we can't find any secondary source that can be used to support the article (aside from brief mentions in game reports, which don't support notability). Your comment implies that you do believe such sources exist. Have you found any that you can point me in the direction of? As I said above, I'm happy to withdraw the nomination if a couple good sources can be found. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 20:44, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: The keep votes aren't really addressing the question of GNG sufficiently to close as keep at the moment.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Fenix down (talk) 23:46, 27 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I am looking through the sources and I see a brief mention of him winning Austrian Amateur player of the year here and the fact that he only 15km outside of his current club that he plays for in this reference. The rest of them at the moment I see only brief mentions of him in his match reports but isn't that what most pages on Wikipedia are like with football players. There is also the fact that he has played for 1274 minutes in an eligible WP:FPL league which would swing me over to a Keep for now. HawkAussie (talk) 03:09, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
1274 minutes is less than one season's worth of football, isn't it? In a second-tier league? I'm not at all surprised that there is no in-depth coverage of this player. Why would there be? Readers can look up his stats at Soccerway or Worldfootball.net... what is the point of copying those stats to Wikipedia? I don't get it. Levivich 06:30, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nfitz, I tried to improve the article. That is generally my first action with these Stats-only player pages; find a couple sources and then add them. The issue here is that no sources can be found that can be used to meet the GNG. (And NO, NFOOTY does not let us ignore the GNG or WP:V). NFOOTY is only a rule of thumb for what generally meets the GNG (that's why it says presumed notable, not *is* notable); NFOOTY does not determine what is notable and what isn't. I hate to beat a dead horse, but honestly, it is 100% against policy to say that something that can't be demonstrated to meet the GNG is notable because of NFOOTY, and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS can't override policy either, so just voting in numbers is not a solution either. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 19:21, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Improve the article then - the German version is far more extensive. The whole point of notability guidelines, is we shouldn't having to be wasting our time with such nominations, when there's been little attempt to improve the article. Nfitz (talk) 19:43, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nfitz, The "far more extensive" German stub is full of either unsourced info or is just "he moved from X division to Y division on Z date" because that's all that can be verified via stats pages. No sources are available (that I have seen) that would enable me to meaningfully expand the article with encyclopedic content, that's why I brought it to AfD. Once again, I am happy to withdraw if 2 or more sources of decent quality can be found. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 01:33, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Don't say you tried to improve the article then - when there's easy ways to do so, and you didn't do it. Nfitz (talk) 03:50, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Improve it with what sources? Levivich 04:07, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The ones I mentioned above. They would improve the article, and WP:ATH has been met, and as WP:DINC, any source would help improve the article. Nfitz (talk) 18:37, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, but I'm not seeing where you mentioned any sources above? You only mentioned German Wikipedia, which we can't use as a source, and their article is sourced to statistics websites (like transfermarkt) and a fan blog (fansports.com), which also can't be used to improve the article. So, what sources do we use to improve the article? Levivich 21:11, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Not only can those sources be used to improve the article (there's other stats sites that confirm the transfermarkt information), there's more prose there as well. Nothing precludes article improvement. Claiming that one tried to improve the article, when one didn't, is not right. Nfitz (talk) 00:10, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You keep saying "the sources", "those sources", etc., what sources are you talking about??? Are you saying we should cite our article to the German Wikipedia article? Or to Transfermarket? Or Fansports.com? Or if not those, then to what are we citing? Levivich 00:48, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
What I said was pretty clear. I think your time would be better trying to improve the article, rather than forever arguing with people who disagree with you. Nfitz (talk) 19:40, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'd love to improve this article. What sources shall I use? Levivich 19:54, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Never mind, others have done this. Nfitz (talk) 00:17, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nfitz, With regards to insinuations that I am lying about trying to improve the article; let me be clear. Many sportspeople pages are created with only links to stats pages and little to no other info. This is generally in violation of WP:NOTSTATS, but it is fine so long as better sources exist that can be used to expand the article later on. When I said that I always try to improve these articles, what I mean is that my first action is always to search for additional sources, and at the very least add a couple of them to the article (perhaps with some additional info about the subject that would be useful/interesting to the reader). I tried that with this article, but found zero sources of sufficient quality to add anything meaningful to the article. What you are talking about (if I am reading correctly) is expanding the article to merely include more statistics info sourced to stats pages. Expansion is not necessarily improvement, especially if that expansion is merely more meaningless statistics. So no, I'm not going to expand it with more statistical info, especially when the result would still be an article which fails Wikipedia's notability guidelines that I would still be obligated to bring to AfD. Do we know anything about this guy at all aside from some numbers about what games he has played and what teams he has played for? Due to the plethora of stats paged fueled by fantasy football leagues, those sorts of statistics can be looked up for virtually any amateur player as well (from levels well below the threshold for notability). Links to stats pages without any significant coverage about the person do not support notability. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 19:31, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't insinuated you were lying. I insinuated that you had significantly exaggerated that you tried to improve the article. I see no edits that attempted to improve the article. When the article was 38 minutes old, you tagged it for issues. One minute later you fixed a typo. And then you waited 12 minutes before sending it to AFD, despite knowing the subject easily meeting WP:NATH. I don't see that this is trying to improvie the article. Please don't claim you've made edits, that you haven't made. Perhaps you could apologize for this, by now trying to improve the article! Nfitz (talk) 19:40, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nfitz, I have explained what I meant. In any case, even if a subject meets the criteria for WP:NFOOTY, if sources cannot be found for the subject to meet the WP:General notability guideline, then the presumption of notability made by NFOOTY does not apply. NFOOTY does not create notability, it is merely a general rule of thumb to indicate at what sporting level athletes will often meet the GNG. However, they still have to meet the GNG to be considered notable. This seems to be a concept that keep !voters saying "passes WP:NFOOTY" do not understand (despite the fact that I explained it in the nomination and several times in this AfD). If keep !voters are going to ignore how our notability guidelines work and !vote 'keep' anyway, they I would suggest that the closer discount such !votes in the close; a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS or simple majority of !voters cannot override policy and guidelines. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 00:49, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's not just a rule of thumb, it's a guideline. A guideline to create a black line, so that we don't have people wasting our time with endless debates about which point younger players are notable. If cases where there's one fully professional cap of a few minutes, and no coverage, then that's an exception that's worth talking. But a young player, who made their first fully professional cap only 16 months ago, and has since had 17 caps, with sources that support this, is well past where the black line has been set. By pushing a more discerning standard here, rather than at Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports), you just serve to create confusion, and potentially waste the time that this black line is meant to save. Nfitz (talk) 03:44, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nfitz, I've explained this several times before on this page. Please look up the definition of 'presumed'. NFOOTY does not say that players that pass it's arbitrary thresholds ARE notable, it says that they are "presumed notable". Presumed means "suppose that something is the case on the basis of probability". They still have to pass the GNG; NFOOTY just tells us what is likely to pass the GNG. This guy does not pass the GNG. I admit that the sports notability guidelines are confusing but the word 'presumed' was chosen intentionally. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 11:06, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Are you really suggesting that we must now start carefully examining hundreds of players a year (a month?) who achieve full professional status, and are at the beginning of their career? There's no lack of sources to confirm what this player does, from reliable sources, and they are playing almost every week. GNG doesn't trump common sense - the amount of extra work for the project from your interpretation of how to deal with this, could be immense, and it is entirely unnecessary based on a poor intepretation of non-existent rules. It's easy enough to improve the article - if you'd actually done what you claimed to have done in the beginning. Nfitz (talk) 14:21, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nfitz, When creating articles, authors should provide sources showing that the subject is notable. If they don't, they should at least verify that such sources exist. If they can't, perhaps they shouldn't be so hasty in creating an article on a player who has just started their career and may or may not end up getting significant coverage in reliable sources? Doing otherwise is contrary to WP:V and WP:RS. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 00:31, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Insertcleverphrasehere I think you are confusing WP:V,WP:RS, and GNG. V requires that the information in the article is verifiable - and it surely is. RS requires that reliable sources be used, and surely they have been. Your issue seems to be that you want longer, more detailed articles, to meet GNG (though I think we are pretty close to that already). But that doesn't mean there are any WP:V orWP:RS issues. Nfitz (talk) 03:55, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
... and WP:BLP and WP:NOR and the first pillar. Levivich 00:51, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
There's no original research here - and you know it. And I don't see any BLP violations either. I don't know if you are just throwing stuff out there, without thinking about it, or if you really don't understand these policies - but either way, you can't argue it this way. Nfitz (talk) 03:55, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A BLP that is based on primary sources violates the WP:BLPPRIMARY part of WP:BLP, and the WP:PSTS and WP:SYNTH parts of WP:NOR. Levivich 04:22, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see any primary sources in either the English-language or German-language versions. There's certainly nothing in the article that's not confirmed by secondary sources. I don't see how this is an issue. What words in the article do you consider original research or a BLP violation? Nfitz (talk) 06:06, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
If you don't see primary sources in the article, you need to reread WP:PRIMARY and WP:USEPRIMARY and look again, particularly at the statistics websites and the reports of contemporaneous events, like matches and transfers and such. Nowhere did I say there are words in the article that I consider BLP or OR violations–I guess you should re-read my comments above, too, if that's what you took away from them. I'm done here, Fitz. Levivich 18:37, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
That's a good point made by User:Levivich. A review of that DRV makes it clear that, especially as noted by User:Dream Focus, "WP:NOTABILITY clearly states an article is notable if it passes the GNG or one of the subject specific guidelines. It has never had to do both". As this AFD is a much larger pass of NFOOTBALL (over 17 appearances for a 22-year old who is starting regularly, versus 3 appearances about 70 years ago) and has by far better references and sourcing, then, there should be no doubt that the delete votes here should have no weight! Nfitz (talk) 01:08, 5 December 2019 (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.