Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Melissa Skirboll

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' per the below and WP:INN. Cbrown1023 03:17, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Melissa Skirboll

Delete Non notable individual per WP:BIO and notability guidelines, WP:NN. I'm surprised the article has lasted this long. One might be made notable through press coverage resulting from their appearance on a game show, but not simply by appearing on it or else we would have an article for every game show contestant which is simply not encyclopedic. For instance, many contestants on the show American Idol have become famous yet did not win. This is not the case here. Strothra 20:56, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Strothra implies that it is obvious to someone familiar with the relevant policies and guidelines that this article's subject is non-notable. I don't see that at all. I'm not a game show aficionado myself, and found this article through ~~Red Director's contribution history~~ User:Red Director/Pages I have created, but it is clear to me from the claims of record-setting in this article itself, and in the article on the television program Greed, that she would be considered notable by game show aficionados. I believe it would be highly controversial to start deleting articles on "trivia" about baseball, Star Trek, or Tolkien's fiction, however lacking in interest they might be to those not part of the relevant fandom. I am a new user and could be wrong about this, but I believe the subject deserves more discussion than Strothra's dismissive comments would imply, especially in light of the lack of clarity of the notability guidelines themselves. Perhaps Strothra would like to write a proposed guideline on "fandom" articles, including game show fandom, or point me to such a guideline if it already exists? —Neuromath 23:14, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that would be controversial. That's why I didn't do it. I nominated this article, not articles about triva regarding baseball, etc. No notability of these individuals among "game-show aficionados" is established in the articles. --Strothra 03:06, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

See my remarks on record-setting above. Records are surely relevant to notability among sports figures; why not among game show contestants? Also see my comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Daniel Avila for further evidence. These three people (including Curtis Warren, who was involved in the same notable episode, and whose article you have also proposed for deletion) may not be known to the general public in the way that Ken Jennings is, but neither are many notable figures in sports. —Neuromath 04:48, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Fails to meet criteria of WP:BIO. Simply put, she was a game show contestant on a short-lived cancelled game show, albeit successful. There's lots of game shows, lots of contestants, lots of winners. Not all of them are encyclopedic. Whether or not articles on baseball, Star Trek, or Tolkien's characters are notable or encyclopedic has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not this article is encyclopedic. Agent 86 07:18, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

See the current MfD on Wikipedia:Fancruft for a clear illustration of the lack of consensus for deleting supposed trivia; many of the contributors there would like to delete that essay because it has been used to justify deleting articles like the three in question here. Game show fans may not get the respect that fans of baseball, Star Trek, or Tolkien currently do, but their judgments as to what is significant (and facts that would support or motivate those judgments, such as records set) are no less worthy of consideration. Your selection of facts in your "simply put" summary is supported only by your own personal judgments of relevance. —Neuromath 09:37, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

An update: after brief Google searches, I've found three published references each for Daniel Avila and Curtis Warren, as detailed in my comments on the Daniel Avila AfD and the Curtis Warren AfD. No such published references have turned up for Skirboll; however, her role in the notable episode of Greed where she was part of a team with Avila and Warren is frequently mentioned prominently on fan pages and sites that were turned up in the search. WP:RS, WP:N, and WP:BIO are notoriously unclear, and the best (albeit still, at the moment, non-authoritative) guide I can find to the proper application of their directives on sources is the proposed guideline Wikipedia:Reliable sources/examples. I would urge everyone involved (especially any admin considering the termination of this AfD with a deletion!) to read and consider seriously its section on Popular culture and fiction, especially the last sentence of that section: "When a substantial body of material is available the best material available is acceptable, especially when comments on its reliability are included." Also consider that Wikipedia:Verifiability, which stands behind all of these guidelines and proposed guidelines, is intended to avoid having errors creep into Wikipedia—not to second-guess the tastes of particular segments of the public, such as game-show fans. The facts of Skirboll's accomplishment are not in dispute and are not likely to be disputed, and the fact that her fame among fans has not translated into mention in mainstream publications (as the fame of Avila and Warren did) is irrelevant. The proper application of WP:RS would be completely different if we were talking about scandals or conspiracy theories. —Neuromath 05:05, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Delete as non-notable, since no one has found published stories about her or other indices of notability. Just winning on a game show by itself is not sufficient. Edison 17:44, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I say keep, but not for the reason I created it. Melissa had an memorable appearance on Greed in 2000 that still is talked about to this day. Melissa, Curtis, and Daniel should get to have their own article. Besides, there are many articles on game show contestants that have only appeared once on a game show. Melissa, Curtis, and Daniel are not any of them. She appeared twice on Greed. Daniel appeared twice on Greed and once on Jeopardy!. Curtis has appeared on three different game shows and twice on Greed. So, keep. Red Director 22:19, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comments, Red Director. A related point: the episode you refer to is famous enough that print sources that mention it are likely to exist, even if they can't be found on Google. Books on game shows, even scholarly ones like Olaf Hoerschelmann's Rules of the Game: Quiz Shows And American Culture (SUNY Press, 2006), do exist, although I don't have immediate access to them, as I do to articles available in online form via Google. Even if pages like this one, which expresses the value judgment that this was "the greatest moment in game show history", are not considered reliable enough to be cited as sources themselves, their high estimation of this episode is an indication that it is likely to have made it into print treatments of the subject as well. Rather than deleting this article along with its page history and its uncontroversial factual assertions, it would be more constructive to leave it in place with "needs to cite" tags. —Neuromath 07:04, 20 January 2007 (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.