The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was delete. JohnCD (talk) 10:45, 14 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Draft:Jordan Lawson

[edit]

Article has been repeatedly submitted to AfC in spite of not improving. The most recent attempts were 1) they created a press release on Newswire and tried to pass it off as a reliable source and 2) "re-edited" the article claiming that they were assured in chat that their source was reliable, even though no new source had been added to the article. These are obvious attempts to game the system. (Note: the only sources provided so far have been IMDB and the phony press release.) LaMona (talk) 16:17, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Just for a bit more context on this, the submitters have been pulling some really transparent stunts to try to fool us into taking the press release as an independent reliable source in and of itself — the most recent time, which LaMona rejected today, the press release was actually credited to a fake publication whose name was "Independent Third Party Entertainment News Publishing Source". It was actually the same press release, on the same platform, as when I rejected it just one week ago, although some of the details had been reedited in the intervening days: when I rejected it, the publication's name was credited differently (but still verifiably nonexistent), while the page content contained an extended disclaimer at the top about how independent and encyclopedically reliable that publication was. (As I pointed out in my rejection comment, however, the sources don't get to tell us whether they pass our RS rules or not — we make that decision ourselves according to our rules.) And the first time they tried the self-written press release angle, which was rejected by Wiae, it was the exact same press release it's been both times since, just posted to Digital Journal instead of Newswire.

Looking back, there was one other source, rejected by both Wiae and myself on two separate occasions, that was formatted as a Q&A interview. I rejected it because Q&A interviews don't count toward WP:GNG, but I had only eyeballed the format. Looking at it again now, I see that I completely glossed over the even more outrageous problem with it: it was actually also a press release, formatted to look like it was coming from a more independent reliable media source than it really was but then giving away its provenance as a press release at the end, and featuring really bad, meandering and blatantly unprofessional interview questions designed to ensure that every claim of fact in this article was directly referenceable to it (e.g. mentioning twelve different movie credits in the lead-up to a question that didn't actually have anything to do with any of them, so that every single title in his filmography list was being directly named by the source as well.) So it was also a fake self-published source created by the same person or people trying to get this through our gates.

A potential article subject is not allowed to game our system by creating their own fake sources to cover off our referencing requirements — it takes real media coverage in real media, not self-published press releases credited to fake media outlets, to get a person into Wikipedia. This page was first created just 12 days ago, and in that time has already been submitted and rejected seven times — and every single one of those times, the sourcing was either (a) nonexistent, (b) parked on blogs and podcasts, or (c) a variation on this "trying to curveball a press release around the fence" game. Delete, preferably with a liberal dose of salt because having to deal with this is getting tiresome. Bearcat (talk) 21:24, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Update: For the record, I've found the discussion which the creator was referring to when they claim to have been told that the press release was an acceptable source — not surprisingly, they misrepresented the discussion that actually took place. The press release was not offered for direct evaluation, but rather the OP simply put forward an assertion of having a "THIRD PARTY, Journalist written, Biography about the actor's career" — to which the response was "Would you mind adding the source to the draft? Third-party is good, but it's difficult to judge these things based on generic descriptions." So no, they definitely were not told that it was a good enough source — at best, they were told that we would have to see the source before we could figure out whether it was good enough or not. Bearcat (talk) 17:44, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Note the submitters are IP addresses so blocking for disruptive editing (which this is) isn't feasible at the moment). Not sure about the need for salting since (WP:BEANS though) it hasn't been necessary at mainspace for whatever reason. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:58, 2 February 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 page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.