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 no consensus. Opinions are divided about whether the coverage is sufficient to pass WP:GNG, irrespective of whether or not a more specialized guideline's requirements are met.  Sandstein  12:57, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Emily Henderson[edit]

Emily Henderson (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Fails WP:GNG, hasn't been the subject of significant coverage in reliable sources. Also fails WP:NFOOTBALL, hasn't played in a tier 1 international match or in a fully professional football league. Hack (talk) 13:38, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Plays in the top-league in Australia, a country in the top 10 women's football teams in the world. It's ridiculous to apply the same WP:FPL rules to women's football when there are currently only 3 fully-pro leagues in the world. --SuperJew (talk) 21:07, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Football-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:29, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sportspeople-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:29, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:29, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good points. Are these same standards expected of men in top division leagues around the world? Hmlarson (talk) 01:31, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • They should be. The unfortunate reality is that WP:NFOOTBALL is too often used as a be-all and end-all, with players satisfying the reqs for "presumed" notability rarely being questioned, whilst those who don't fulfill them are often challenged, even in the face of significant coverage. But of course all subjects should satisfy WP:N in order to justify an article. Macosal (talk) 01:39, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Macosal:, and a male player whose only appearance in a top-division league is a five minute cameo at the end of a dead rubber match is notable for an article? The notability baseline should move from fully pro leagues to top division + fully pro. --SuperJew (talk) 09:06, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, as I said above. WP:NFOOTBALL has become over-observed, with people ignoring WP:N. Again I'd ask, are there enough non-routine sources to make Henderson's article more than a stub? I can't see evidence of that, and without that no article should exist, irrespective of gender or professionalism... Macosal (talk) 10:40, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ok your talk seems consistent. When you start nominating players like Jais Malsarani and Tom Slater for deletion I'll support your AFD's for women footballers playing in the top level league. --SuperJew (talk) 10:58, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • In what sense is this "my" AfD? To be honest I don't like to see material deleted from Wikipedia, and have never nominated any article for deletion (note I didn't even vote delete here, just a comment...). The reason I joined this discussion is to reframe it, because I believe WP:NFOOTBALL shouldn't be treated as the silver bullet it too often is (and was being by those contributing before me). Keeping on topic, what point is there in this article remaining when there is literally no specific information (non-routine) on its subject on the internet? Do we have evidence of notability? The WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS example you give is not a good one... Look up Tom Slater and you will find plenty of info about his time at the Mariners, his relationship with his father etc, whereas I can find literally nothing on Henderson anywhere (and seemingly nor can anyone else?). Macosal (talk) 12:00, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in WikiProject Football's list of association football-related deletions. Spiderone 09:59, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Fenix down: Please, I'd love to see all the dedicated articles about Jais Malsarani for example. --SuperJew (talk) 17:09, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • @SuperJew: Well, completely ignoring the fact that you are trying to compare a full senior international with a routine club player, let's have a quick look. Now, my Vanuatuan is not strong but a two minute Google search throws up this which seems to me to be at least one article of reasonable length and of a non routine nature that seems to focus on the player. Now could I ask you to refrain from the creation of further pointless, not to mention incorrect, strawmen and concentrate on this player. Perhaps you might be able to show an example of some significant third party coverage she has received? Fenix down (talk) 20:37, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Seems to me more a routine announcement of his addition with other players to some squad, but also not strong with my Vanuatuan so we're just guessing here. My point is that this double standard between genders is ridiculous. The majority of top men's leagues in countries are considered FPL because the sport currently pays them more. The extra payment leads to more advertising, branding, more fans, more money etc. While the women's leagues are underpaid if at all. If you want money to be your deciding factor in writing a free open encyclopaedia, that seems counter intuitive to me. --SuperJew (talk) 21:04, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well money is an easy, though not perfect way of indicating notability. No one is going to pay if they don't get something in return if there isn't the attention on a league it won't attract money and if there isn't attention on the league then the players aren't notable and that has nothing to do with gender . That said GNG still trumps everything and there are many many female footballers who meet NFOOTY having played senior international football who have no article or justa stub. It always confuses me that those who talk of gender bias always seem to discuss it in AfDs for minor club players rather than getting on and creating content for the genuinely more notable female international players. Fenix down (talk) 21:57, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
How does the subject pass WP:GNG? Hack (talk) 03:12, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Nice attempt to distract from the points raised in regards to (the Men's) Football Project. Hmlarson (talk) 03:24, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It clearly fails both WP:GNG and WP:NFOOTBALL. I'm not deflecting anything. Hack (talk) 03:37, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
WP:FOOTY fails women's football. Yep, that's the point. Hmlarson (talk) 04:31, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Here is not the place to have this discussion, but I don't think it does. At a base level, you need to have some way of presuming notability or not - there are simply too many footballers in the world to make constant, individual assessments on each one. So WPFOOTY has created a set of indicia for players who are likely or can be presumed to be notable. Pro leagues is not a bad way of doing this, but if you have an alternative you should raise it at WT:FOOTY or Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports). However, the question I would ask is: is it accurate to say that playing W-League football is a good indicator of notability? Both in the sense that there is demonstrable public interest in and sufficient non-routine coverage of each player to create an article? I think my conclusion is no - and this article is a good example - there is no non-routine information about this player on the internet. WP:FOOTY guideline or not, I believe this article fails WP:N. Macosal (talk) 06:01, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Please, Pro leagues is not a bad way of presuming notability for men's leagues. It's a terrible way of presuming notability for women's league. In what way are the Dutch, Swedish and U.S. leagues different notability-wise to the Australian, English, French, German, etc. leagues? Playing at a top-level (+non-top-level pro leagues) seems a better way to go for all genders. Also add to the fact that many women play in two leagues during the year (because they need to eat), so therefore twice as likely to have notability. --SuperJew (talk) 10:37, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
And you avoided the question about why it makes sense that any male player who plays 5 minutes in a dead-rubber match in the top-level league of the main football countries is considered notable, even if they have the same amount of coverage as a woman player in same position. We should either apply this coverage question to all footballers, regardless of gender, which would bring to deletion of many fringe male players, or go with as I suggested above, change the presumed notability to top-level leagues (which I prefer, since I prefer not to go around deleting articles). --SuperJew (talk) 10:51, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
There are fundamental issues with the viewpoint of the core of editors and these are as follows:
  1. The whole "top-level league" argument is routinely raised and routinely rejected for the simple reason that no one in their right mind would consider a player, of either gender, sufficiently notable for a standalone article because they have played in the Niue Soccer Tournament.
  2. Subject-specific notability guidelines must be equal for all genders.
  3. Women's football, like it or not, is far, far less popular on a global basis than the men's game. It has much lower tv audiences, it has much more sparse television coverage, there is only a fraction of the money in the women's game than the men's, attendances are much much lower. These facts are all a function of the popularity of the sport and therefore of its notability.
  4. This factual discrepancy is reflected in WP:FPL, it is not perfect, but, noting the "all player's in top-level leagues should be notable" argument above, no one has come up with a workable alternative that doesn't results in a lower notability for the women's game based solely on gender.
  5. The solution to the gender bias is not necessarily to change notability guidelines but to actually get editor's writing about female footballers. There are hundreds of female footballers who pass WP:NFOOTY already due to having made full international appearances (see Egypt as an example) and this only includes current players. Additionally, there are many female footballers (see this AfD for example) who fail NFOOTY, but pass GNG who do not have articles written about them.
What needs to happen is for these gaps to be filled first, let all GNG satisfying female footballers have articles, then there is purpose in discussing the subject-specific guideline. The way this argument is being presented at the moment is always to my mind about quantity of articles not quality. Anyway, like Macosal said above, here is not the right forum; why does someone not start an RfC on this and get some third party input? Fenix down (talk) 11:17, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well said. As I said at the start of this discussion, WP:NFOOTY doesn't confer notability, it creates a presumption (or not). Of course there are broader issues here, but I can't see how anybody can argue to keep an article about a player with seemingly 0 non-routine coverage in reliable independent sources, regardless of NFOOTY. Macosal (talk) 13:08, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Therein lies the problem Macosal. It presumes notability. For men, any man playing at the top club level he can be playing at (meaning a top-level club in a one of the football countries who are top of the rankings) is presumed notable, while for women not any woman playing at the same level is presumed notable, as the top leagues in Germany (ranked 2nd worldwide), France (ranked 3rd), England (ranked 5th), Australia (ranked 7th) or Japan (ranked 8th) are "not professional enough". Does it make sense that a player playing regularly in the top-league of the 2nd or 3rd ranked country worldwide does not have the same presumed notability as a player who plays even one minute in a country ranked 143rd worldwide (even in the second league)? --SuperJew (talk) 16:40, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
SuperJew, you seem to be making a major error here there is no guideline that states that a man playing in a top level league is notable, only those in leagues that are deemed to have reliable sourcing to fully professional status.
Furthermore, the notion that simply playing one minute in a qualifying league is sufficient is also not true. You may wish to review these AfDs: Oscar Otazu, Vyacheslav Seletskiy, Aleksandr Salimov, Andrei Semenchuk, Artyom Dubovsky, Cosmos Munegabe, Marios Antoniades, Scott Sinclair, Fredrik Hesselberg-Meyer, Matheus Eccard, Roland Szabó (2nd nomination), Metodija Stepanovski, Linas Klimavičius, Takumi Ogawa, Nicky Fish and Andrei Nițu, amongst others. They are all examples of male footballers scraping over the NFOOTY line, but never really progressing and then being deleted as GNG failures. Undoubtedly, there are many more out there and I would encourage you to nominate them.
Finally it obviously makes sense that we don't assume notability for players in the top ranked women's leagues in the same way we do for the men, because they are inherently less notable. A simple analysis of key statistics shows that. For example, The FA WSL may be ranked 5th in the world for women's leagues, but this from the FA shows an average 2015 attendence of a mere 1,076. On the other hand , this shows the premier league to have had an average attendence of 35,324 for the same season, 33 times higher. Even if you look at the HK league you cited above, for the same season shows average attendences essentially equal to the WSL.
This is the reason in microcosm why WP:FPL, although not perfect works in the main: the 148th ranked men's league is just as popular (and I note in a country with a much lower population) as the 5th ranked women's league. There is no getting around this fact: the women's game, globally, attracts far less interest than the men's and is comparably less notable as a result. I reiterate though, for the millionth time, there are hundreds, if not thousands of female footballers who are notable not just through GNG, but also through NFOOTY via senior international appearances. I don't understand why no one picks up on this and starts writing articles for them. Fenix down (talk) 17:21, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
LOL. When you actually take the time to learn about the history of women's football / soccer, contribute to articles about women's football / soccer players, and earn some deserved authority, let us know. Here's a clue: DO NOT RELY ON WP: FOOTY. Women players are largely excluded by the project in every WikiProject-related regard, it should really be re-named Men's Football. Maybe the growth of women's football is threatening in some way despite the first FIFA Women's World Cup occurring in 1991 vs 1930 for the men. You can find plenty more of this type of thing and numerous conversations just like this re: notability in the project archives. Hmlarson (talk) 18:17, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
See also this kind of IP hilarity: [1], 2.
Your ad hom adds nothing to the discussion. I'm not sure why you can't engage with a simple statistical analysis. Some sort of refutation of the observation that relative notability is perhaps indicated by simple statements such the FA WSL attracting as many spectators as the HK League would be more useful in supporting your argument. Anyhow, to me the best way to deal with gender bias is not to criticise other editors in AfDs on minor players but to get on and create articles on notable women. I already pointed out Egypt above. There are more than 25 articles on female senior international footballers in the current squad just waiting to be created and the rest of African women's football is just as neglected as far as I can see. Fenix down (talk) 18:42, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'll get right on that statistical report to summarize how many times this type of thing occurs and is "managed" by most of the same WP:FOOTY editors here, despite a project that is made up of approximately 400+ editors. Hmlarson (talk) 18:58, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If you want those listed, just add sources as requested Fenix down (talk) 19:20, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
For an essay? Ok. I'll also add ((cn|date=October 2016)) tags for "fully professional" mentions in WP:FOOTYN and WP:FPL. Hmlarson (talk) 20:02, 5 October 2016 (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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