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 delete. NW (Talk) 21:55, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Shane Dawson

[edit]
AfDs for this article:
Shane Dawson (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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Lack of coverage in independent, reliable sources. No indication that this individual is notable enough for inclusion. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 19:45, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This article has been deleted on a few occasions:
12:38, 5 March 2010 JohnCD (talk · contribs) deleted "Shane Dawson" ‎ (A7: Article about a real person, which does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject)
04:42, 10 February 2009 PMDrive1061 (talk · contribs) deleted "Shane Dawson" ‎ (G4: Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion)
10:18, 25 July 2008 Tikiwont (talk · contribs) deleted "Shane Dawson" ‎ (AfD discussion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Shane Dawson)
The current incarnation (which is generally the same as the deleted version, apart from having had a "history" section added) was CSD'd, but the tag was removed by an IP, then PROD'd, but contested. -- Phantom'Steve/talk|contribs\ 19:57, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Under the wikipedia "rules", a baseball player who played a single game in the major leagues in 1896 qualifies as notable without a hitch. Indeed wikipedia is full of insignificant athletes who no one knew of even when they were alive. They all easily qualify as "notable" if they played a single game in the major professional leagues.
There are hundreds of thousands of articles on individual songs from albums no one has heard by bands no one knows about.
It is bewildering to me that so many people can spend many thousands of hours acting like pencil pushing bureaucrats on wikipedia, contributing nothing of substance, but they still cannot evaluate the relative importance of things without consulting a rule book. And they do not realize that applying the rules in the rule book spits back answers that are absurd.
If you need a scale to determine whether an elephant or a flea weighs more, that's fine and dandy. But if the scale tells you the flea weighs more then that's a problem.
Wake up people. This is the Web 2.0 world and if Wikipedia can't figure out how to incorporate information that interests people then it will wither and die.AlexaxelA (talk) 13:30, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
AlexaxelA, if you don't like the criteria which are used on Wikipedia, there are two choices: Either start an RfC about it and get community consensus to change what is meant by "notability"; or start your own Wiki. The software is out there, and if you are correct, you will quickly become more useful than Wikipedia, while we wither and die! Either way, I nominated this on the basis of the notability guidelines as they currently stand, and unless you can find some reliable sources which have articles about him (see my reply to Dyaa below), then I see no reason why I need to withdraw my nomination. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 15:08, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Phantomsteve; do you always use that tone when such arguments evolve? --Dyaa (talk) 17:21, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
When people speak out against something their country is doing, do you respond by suggesting that if they don't like it they should go move to another country? That "argument" is just as persuasive and constructive as yours. Perhaps you are correct and I should just remain silent while Wikipedia continues to become boated with worthless minutia while it declines to include information on people that are the subject of thousands of google searches per day. I really don't care one way or the other. While I find the sort of behavior I see here intolerably annoying, I have to overcome my own weakness in getting distracted by things like this when I have other more pressing matters to attend to. AlexaxelA (talk) 17:57, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, I don't always "use that tone" - as you would be able to see if you looked at the various AfDs at which I have commented. It is very easy for a new user to speak out against what Wikipedia is doing - but then that same user does not actually have something to contribute to the discussion about notability other than to basically say "the things that are excluded from Wikipedia are wrong, some of the things included are wrong..." - I didn't just say "you are wrong": I gave 2 ways to chance things (ok, the 2nd one, creating your own wiki, was a bit sarcastic!) - but the first one (starting an RfC about the notability guidelines) was not being sarcastic. At the moment, according to the guidelines, Shane Dawson is not notable enough to warrant an article on Wikipedia. I replied to Dyaa's comment below about why another YouTube celeb is included whereas I do not feel that Shane should be. If you believe that Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion are incorrect, then there are community ways to change them - this is a community, and the community decide whether things are changed. This AfD is a community discussion. If the consensus is that Shane is notable enough to have the article kept, I will not be pissed off - I'll be happy that the discussion has shown that the community believe that Shane is notable enough for inclusion. If the consensus is that the article should be deleted, I will not be dancing with joy. It's not a personal thing for me - I saw an article which I do not believe meets the criteria for inclusion, and so I nominated it for deletion.
The whole purpose of AfD is to ensure that a discussion takes place whereby the merits of deleting or keeping the article can be discussed, and a decision made based on that. It's one of the benefits of this system - and in cases in the past, I have withdrawn a nomination for deletion when people have persuaded me through their arguments that the article should be kept. On other AfDs, I have changed from "delete" to "keep" or vice-versa based on arguments presented. It's a discussion, and everyone should be open to changing their mind if the evidence warrants it, and I am happy to do this in this case should significant coverage in reliable sources were to be found. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 18:19, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As a rule, using the argument "other stuff exists" is not really a useful argument at AfD. If Shane had been given a featured player role in MADtv, I would probably not have nominated this article for deletion - but he is only a featured player on his own channel. If Shane had an article all about him in a world-recognised newspaper like the NY Times, I would not have nominated this - yet all the mentions I can find of him in the media (like The Independent on Sunday are not about him, but list him on a list of 'most-watched YouTube videos' - and all the other mentions of him which I can find in reliable sources are similarly minor. Show me some articles about him (i.e. not a minor entry on a list of most-watched videos) written in a national/international newspaper/magazine, then I might reconsider - but I couldn't find them. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 15:08, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If you've got a better copy coming up then why delete the article? What ever happened to the concept of a stub? A work in progress? Do we now require the first draft of an article to stand as proof of the article's worthiness? If so I'd say that's a shame. It's those kind of stub articles that I used to most enjoy fleshing out. Ben Arnold (talk) 12:39, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Also, he has ample news coverage! The Google news search at the top of the AFD should've been used by anyone, before they tried to delete it. [1] Forbes magazine covers him, among others. You can't say to delete something because it lacks coverage, when you aren't willing to spend a few seconds clicking on the Google news search thing up there, to check for coverage. Sheesh. Dream Focus 18:06, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
DreamFocus, I did look at the hits at Google News, including the Forbes one. The hits about him (rather than about the convicted criminal, which quite a few were about, along with a sportsman) were basically listing him in "the most viewed YouTube people" kind of lists. In the first 10 hits, the 10th is the Forbes one. (in fact, if I recall correctly, the next mention of this Shane Dawson didn't occur until about the 90th hit or something like that). When I came across the Forbes one, I actually held out hopes that I might find more useful coverage, but all the other ones I checked just had a single-sentence mention of him on a "list of most-viewed YouTube people" type of things. So, DreamFocus, please don't accuse people of not bothering to look at sources - I can't talk for others here, but I did look, as I always do for articles I nominate for deletion (or on which I !vote).PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 22:36, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Click the link I provided. I searched for his name, and then "YouTube", thus filtering out all the wrong hits. Salon mentions him as "exceedingly popular" [2]. The Star mentions it somewhat, although negatively. [3] I didn't bother looking through all 11 results, most of them in Spanish. That's three major English news sources mentioning this though. Dream Focus 22:16, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
With regard to your comment "Being the 4th most subscribed channel on YouTube makes someone clearly notable", which part of WP:N are you referring to there? -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 22:36, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Is Forbes considered a reliable source? I seem to recall in other AfDs that it was discounted as being rather fond of press release material and such. Could be wrong... Peridon (talk) 18:43, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This guy has been named in articles in Forbes and the Toronto Star. If you google youtube and "Shane Dawson" (so that you get the phrase, not just the two names anywhere on the page) you get 1,710,000 hits.

1,710,000 hits.

Let's put this into perspective by comparing this to some other google searches. Note that my Shane Dawson google search only returned hits with the word "youtube" in them. None of the searches below have that limitation.

"Joseph Lieberman" - 376,000 "Barbara Walters" - 1,460,000 "Condoleeza Rice" - 378,000 "Notre Dame Cathedral" - 337,000 "Notre Dame football" - 429,000 "Linus Pauling" - 578,000

If anyone still insists that this person is not worthy to join the ranks of the millions of subjects covered by wikipedia, then my last suggestion is that you first refer to this rule (thanks to Dyaa for mentioning this rule above).AlexaxelA (talk) 20:48, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To my mind Shane Dawson is now the most notable YouTube personality. He is probably the most widely recognised face of this new kind of media. While Fred had a series of popular videos he has a much lower profile as Lucas Cruikshank. Dawson has managed to build a self-made profile both as a personality and as a character actor. He has used "new media" to become a celebrity and develop a signature product alongside this celebrity. Other YouTubers have done this contemporaneously with Dawson but he has been the most notable for his methodical and determined approach and for his outstanding success.
His significance as a trailblazer in YouTube is compounded when the cultural significance of this new kind of media and new kind of media personality is taken into account. He is perhaps the second "new media superstar" after Cruikshank and there is no way I can conceive of this not being a notable achievement.
I appreciate that his successes have not been adequately documented by traditional media and finding sources for notability has proved suprisingly difficult, but I think we have a good case for the article with the references that have been found, and this is the kind of topic where the benefit of the doubt must swing in favour of keeping it. If we delete this article now we'll be relitigating this in a few months when the case for the article is even more clear, so why waste everyone's time? As I've outlined, this article has plenty of room to grow; the subject matter has the requisite depth. It just needs some focused editors to dig up some more substantial commentary. You can't expect an article to be featured quality on day one.
Ben Arnold (talk) 12:22, 12 March 2010 (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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