Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Stella's House

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 - policy based arguments heavily outweigh arguments not based on either policy or special circumstances Wily D 09:23, 21 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Stella's House

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Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions. Cliff Smith 17:57, 13 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There isn't any substantial coverage of these two entities; a Pentecostal magazine, a Scottish tabloid and a local paper from North Carolina don't do much in that direction. - Biruitorul ^Talk 16:07, 13 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am also nominating the following related page:

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Moldova-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:52, 14 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Stella's House – This topic passes WP:GNG per:

Annie Brown, "Abandoned girls tell how their wretched lives have been transformed", Daily Record, Mar 31 2012
Mary Hutchinson. "A Home For Stella". Charisma Magazine. Retrieved February 3, 2011.
Lukas Johnson, "Cabarrus residents heed Stella's Voice", Charlotte Observer Nov. 30, 2011

— Northamerica1000^(talk) 06:02, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - The general notability guideline has been met by the above sources. Neelix (talk) 15:01, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Snow Keep per patent lack of WP:BEFORE. Easily sourcable, passes GNG. Cavarrone (talk) 16:16, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Sorry, I don't need that kind of condescending remark from you. If you'd bothered to read my nomination statement, you would have found that I took aim at all three "sources" located by Northamerica1000, as they were already present in the article. -Biruitorul ^Talk 17:30, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

With respect, I confirm my remark. WP:BEFORE does not mean consider just references currently named in an article, but search for additional sources. Otherwise you would have found:

A cover story on Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [1]
Multiple articles on The Press and Journal [2], [3], [4]
An article on WAFF [5]
An article on Independent Tribune [6]
An article on Buchan Observer [7]... and so on. Cavarrone (talk) 19:41, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- More passing mentions inside local puffery:
This has three sentences on the subject in a far larger article, so hardly counts as "significant coverage".
This has half a sentence.
Local story, not something normally noticed by this encyclopedia.
Human interest story, barely mentions Stella's House.
A news story from a local TV station? That's pushing it in WP:RS terms. "Building safe housing from the ground up for young girls like Stella, to save these girls from the streets... Now, thanks to a miraculous offering from the Rock, Stella's house two is a reality." Obviously, that kind of writing is not quotable in an actual article.
More puffery/infomerical-type stuff: "The group of citizens behind this local effort is asking for tax-deductible donations, in addition to having a clothing drive. The gently-used clothing donations will be sold in a resale store and will then provide income for the ministry and the orphans."
And even more: "The Ambassador got a guided tour off [sic] the house and also heard the story of one young girl, Dasa Rosca, which moved both himself and his wife to tears."
- Still waiting on that "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" and that present the subject in neutral, objective, citable language. I can't stop you from chiding me for not doing BEFORE, but no matter how much BEFORE one does, it seems the most one can come up with is unusable local puffery. - Biruitorul ^Talk 20:31, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Naming all these articles puffery, local story, infomerical-type article or human interest story does not change the things. The subject received enough reliable secondary coverage to be considered notable. Also, looking at all your other AfDs, it seems you are looking to promote some kind of WP:POINT about all the sources usually accepted as reliable on WP. Cavarrone (talk) 21:20, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

For one, I reject your insinuation about my conduct at AfD, which is strictly based on policy, but if you have a problem, I will be glad to defend my record at an RfC any day.
For another, I simply happen to believe in maintaining high standards for sourcing. Two lines of passing mention in a puff piece published in a local paper doesn't cut it from a WP:RS standpoint. Neither do a few paragraphs, for that matter. We don't stretch the limits of WP:GNG simply because we want to save an article at AfD. We don't normally accept strictly local coverage, infomercials, puffery and "journalism" of that sort, and that's pretty firm. We need significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, and what you have presented does not fit the bill. - Biruitorul ^Talk 21:54, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry,I would suggest you to read more carefully what "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" means. According WP:GNG "significant coverage" means that sources address the subject directly in detail, so no original research is needed to extract the content. It is more than a trivial mention but it "need not be the main topic of the source material." Per "reliable" see "WP:RELIABLE". "Sources" are meant to be secondary sources. "Independent" excludes self-publicity, advertising, self-published material, press releases. GNG does not say that a penthacostal magazine (it is not a dead link, see here) does not count nor than a local newspaper is excluded from count (despite I consider calling Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "local puffery" quite pointy). So you should list which of these sources are unreliable according WP:RELIABLE requirements, which of these sources is self-published material, which of these are just trivial mentions, which of these are primary sources. Your name-calling every article as "puff piece", "puffery" and so on, being a subjective assessment, does not count. Cavarrone (talk) 22:50, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Puffery is puffery, no matter how hard you're pushing to "rescue" this effort. A clutch of human-interest stories in some no-name local newspapers and a church magazine simply do not meet the requirements of WP:RS, in spite of your pretending otherwise. We would never normally pick up on this sort of thing, and the only reason we're doing so is because of this discussion. The intellectually sound position would be to admit you're stretching things just to keep this article, and abandon this futile quest. - Biruitorul ^Talk 04:30, 20 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Naming a source "puffery" without any further explaination why this source should be considered unreliable is just lack of strong arguments. You're stretching things just to delete this article. Cavarrone (talk) 12:54, 20 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Northamerica1000, this (aside from now being a dead link) is not a reliable source, since it's in a Pentecostal magazine. We tend not to use sources from explicitly religious publications, as they have an inherent bias toward their particular creed.
This is, for one, a puff piece, and for another, it appears in the Daily Record, a practitioner of tabloid journalism. A serious encyclopedia, which this purports to be, does not draw on tabloid material for its articles.
This is yet another informational/puff piece ("Clothes, linens and similar goods also are being accepted. At least a half-dozen churches are helping with the ongoing effort... The vision of Stella's Voice is to speak for all the orphans of Moldova and to give them a safe home and raise them in a Christian environment. In the past five years, the ministry has been an advocate for thousands of orphans"). It's also in a local paper, the sort of coverage we would never normally pick up.
So I ask again: where is the "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject", as required by WP:GNG? - Biruitorul ^Talk 17:30, 16 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There is nothing in our guidelines against using sources that are of a religious nature; all sources are biased, especially those that do not recognize themselves as such. There is also nothing in our guidelines against using local newspapers as sources. Neelix (talk) 14:22, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Even accepting that "all sources are biased", it's meaningless to aver that "those that do not recognize themselves as such" are "especially" biased. This encyclopedia is based on "reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". Such sources do not tend to recognize their bias, yet they form the basis of most of the content here.

Casting aside common sense and granting that church magazines can be used as sources, what usable material, pray tell, is there in this article?

"he felt the Holy Spirit nudging him to visit a second [orphanage] in the city of Hincesti"?

"He was determined to show the love of a Father whose heart ached for them, and who wanted to shelter them at all costs"?

"God’s adoptive love has also healed them from deep wounds in ways no doctor, counselor or psychologist could"?

You're quite correct that local newspapers are also not outright prohibited. But it's quite a sure sign of non-notability if the only coverage that can be retrieved is some cloyingly sentimental fluff from a Pentecostal magazine and some small-town papers. There are countless such church projects in dozens of countries that rightly go unnoticed by this encyclopedia. The only reason we have this pair of articles is because some guy associated with the project decided to promote them here (and of course, that's the only work he did on Wikipedia)—but that really isn't reason to keep them around. - Biruitorul ^Talk 04:30, 20 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It is a widely accepted concept in critical theory that all authors who wish to be taken seriously must recognize their own biases. An author who is biased against a particular topic can productively contribute information to a discussion if he or she acknowledges openly in his or her writing that he or she opposes or dislikes that topic, but if he or she simply states as fact a series of negatively biased information, most of academia will dismiss the resulting article as pseudo-objectivity. The most reliable sources are those that take a stance. Consider the present example. Charisma is an explicitly Pentecostal magazine and states that Philip Cameron was led by the Holy Spirit to build Stella's House. If the magazine pretended it didn't have biases and simply made this statement, it could be dismissed as pseudo-objectivity. Because the magazine presents itself as portraying a Pentecostal worldview, we can use this statement to source a sentence in Wikipedia such as the following: "Philip Cameron is a Christian and believes that the Holy Spirit led him to found Stella's House." Furthermore, the three statements you present above as from the Charisma article are far from representative; there are plenty of statements in the article that could be transferred almost word-for-word onto Wikipedia if reliability were the only issue. Neelix (talk) 12:29, 20 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete on a lack of independent coverage. All of the US-based coverage of these houses appears to be fund-raising publicity material. There is no article which makes it clear that a newspaper staff member has been and seen the houses; there is no trace of investigative journalism and there is no evidence in any of these many interviews of interviewees being asked investigative questions. In short, none of it is independent, thus failing WP:GNG. Stuartyeates (talk) 07:36, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Our guidelines against independent coverage state that we must exclude "works produced by those affiliated with the subject or its creator". On Wikipedia, "independent coverage" does not mean independent observation, but rather independent publication. The sources presented are valid. Neelix (talk) 14:17, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I beg to differ. They talk about editorial independence and editorial oversight. Stuartyeates (talk) 19:44, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Where? I see no such mention in the relevant guideline. Neelix (talk) 12:29, 20 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway I doubt all these regional newspapers have no editorial oversight and independence... Cavarrone (talk) 12:57, 20 July 2012 (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.