Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pastor Don M Spiers

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. Deathphoenix ʕ 17:46, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Pastor Don M Spiers

Not only is this article's subject rather arguable in notablility as well as the title being in the wrong format, but the prose is extremely POV and riddled with phrases that make it sound like it was written by a close friend (I don't believe it was, however). It added {{POVcheck}} tag to it, which was subsequently removed by someone else (who did not make it NPOV). Even the article's picture has no copyright tag whatsoever. If someone wants to remake it, this time with more facts in a NPOV way then they may. Until then, this article should be deleted. NauticaShades^(talk) 15:52, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete NPOV issue and notability issue are very strong cases to remove. TheRanger 16:01, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. This article is terrible. Pastor Don’s life was so inspiring that almost most of church believers can tell of how good the Lord has been to him, what. No. Half the article is nonsense, half of it is pushing religion, and the other half lacks any notibility whatsoever. And yes this article does in fact have three halves. Also the user who created this page appears to have a history of POV-pushing, creating non-notable articles, and just causing general ruckus. ~ lav-chan @ 16:51, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
  • I agree with you. Such phrases as this are not appropriate for an encyclopedia. NauticaShades^(talk) 17:17, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Cleanup instead of delete. --Kf4bdy ^{talk contribs} 17:04, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
• The article is clearly a mis-use of Wikipedia to publish a memorial. It was created the day after the memorial service for the article's subject. Wikipedia is not a memorial. I tried to clean the article up, starting by removing all of the content that was either highly biased (such as text that tacitly assumed that everyone the world is a Christian) or outright unverifiable (such as statements about the subject's thoughts, inner revelations, and aspirations — which readers have no way at all of checking, not even that of asking the subject xyrself, since xe is dead), and ended up with no article. Rewriting is also not an option, because there aren't any sources at all from which to build a neutral and verifiable encyclopaedia article. There's a 1-line obituary notice and that's it. The subject does not satisfy any of the WP:BIO criteria, moreover. Delete. Uncle G 17:25, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Umm, the obituary was in 2004. The article history shows no edits prior to 27 September 2006. It also shows no edits by Uncle G. It also shows no anonymous edits that meet that description. Are you sure that all of the above comment applies to this article? GRBerry 21:58, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Yes. As I explained quite clearly, I tried and ended up with no article. Uncle G 10:08, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Delete This has one of the biggest issues with NPOV policy I've ever seen on the Wikipedia. It reads like an obituary written by a family member. --The Way 10:01, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
• KeepI edited the article to remove POV parts and added references to show notability, as head of youth ministry for Oral Roberts, and David Wilkerson ministries, as Associate Deputy Chief Pastor of the Ceylon Pentecostal Mission, and as having preached to tens of thousands in international evangelism missions. Spiers was known in many countries, and has sufficient notability for inclusion. He was not just a local pastor of a congregation. If there are style problems with the form of the article title, editing is preferred to deletion.Edison 19:38, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
• Tentative Delete I haven't found online any reliable sources to demonstrate notability at WP:BIO levels. I also happen to believe that such sources probably exist in print. But they aren't cited here yet. I ask the closing admin to evaluate the sources at the time of closing, and to count this opinion of the sourcing is reliable then. However, I will note that a failure to have a NPOV is not a reason for deletion if it is possible to overcome the tone/bias problem. If we have sources, it will be possible to overcome the issues with tone. GRBerry 22:15, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. No indication of notability. The fact that he was a sub-pastor of various groups doesn't make him "notable". There are tens of thousands of "sub"-pastors throughout the world. RickReinckens 00:01, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. notability and no citations/verifiability. --Buridan 23:15, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete POV issues aside, he is still a nn that fails WP:BIO. - Tewfik^Talk 15:47, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

A Reply Rencin

Nauticashades strongly insist on deleting this page rather that helping out when I asked as to what should I do. She says about NPOV which might be true, but I did not know. When asked she gave no reply. She thinks this page was created by Pastor Don himself. When I made my point clear then its been put for taging. Really neat.

Lav-chan says pastor Don's life has inspired a lot of people. He also goes on to say that this page has got nonsense "Half the article is nonsense, half of it is pushing religion, and the other half lacks any notibility whatsoever. " .He also says that I (rencin) has got the history of pushing POV.Well I have no idea of that by what he meant to say. All I did was create a page. I haven't gone to push POV or NPOV.

Uncle G says "· The article is clearly a mis-use of Wikipedia to publish a memorial. It was created the day after the memorial service for the article's subject. Wikipedia is not a memorial". He/she also used a word such as tacitly. What do you mean by that now??? He also says there is no other source expect for "a 1-line obituary notice". And so everyone vote for deleting rather than seeing the content and helping me out when I asked so many of them. You can do what you want. Remember this page Pastor Don M Spiers is not a religious promotion. I just created it so that people can know more about him I thought there was also a stub added too. I am not either close friend or I haven't even seen him in person. Thanks a lot for all this. I know I am a new user. rencin24

Response From Nominator

I don't know where to start, to be honest. First of all, I am a he. I don't know where you got the idea tht I was female. Let me sort out this arguement:

• No offense, but try to check your grammar before you save a comment you have written.
• I said it sounds like it was written by the pastor himself, or someone that was very close to him. I meant that it was extremely NPOV.
• You say that you are not trying to push a NPOV view, but you unwittingly are. Like Uncle G has said, you seem to assume that everyone reading this article is Christion, which is certainly not the case.
• You misread lav-chan's comment. He/She wasn't saying the his life was inspiring, he was quoting your article. He/She was saying that such a statement is entirely not appropriate for an encyclopedic article.
• Look up "tacitly" in the Wiktionary if you don't know what it means.
• You may have asked for help, but the article is unsalvageable. As Uncle G said, there is no information on this article with a reliable source or that could be made NPOV.

I wholeheartedly suggest that you familiarize yourself with WP:NOT, WP:BIO, WP:NN, and WP:NPOV. NauticaShades^(talk)

Comment from lav-chan

I did a little formatting work, hope nobody minds.

Anyway i felt i should clarify what i said earlier. NauticaShades is right in describing what i meant — that that sentence was inappropriate, not only because it was nonsensical and badly written, but also because it is, by definition, pushing a religious POV. Which is what some of the article is still doing, despite Edison's claim that he removed POV material. There are still a few 'factual' references to accepting Jesus Christ and the power of God and all that jazz.

That of course isn't grounds to delete the article entirely. Those POV statements could still be reworded or removed. But i think it does illustrate a lack of understanding on the part of the two or three persons who are involved in editing this article (and its related articles, which have similar problems). They seem to be unable to grasp Wikipedia's NPOV and notability guide lines. There are people on the talk pages of these articles congratulating themselves on making things NPOV, and it's just kind of laughable, because it's blatantly POV and they don't even realise it. And i'm not talking about subtle subconscious wording, i'm talking about outright religion being pushed as fact, not even pretending to be neutral.

I hate to come off like i'm crusading against religion. I'm really not. It's just that, whatever religion you may follow, i think it's a very simple matter to detect when you're promoting a faith like that in an article. If you can't do that, you really need to familiarise yourself with Wikipedia's guide lines. And if you still can't do it after reading all that, i think you need to re-evaluate your involvement in certain topics on Wikipedia.

Also, as far as my comment on rencin24's history, i was referring to his talk page, which suggests he has a lot of 'new-comer'-type issues which he doesn't appear to be interested in resolving. They'd be easily forgivable if it was a once-or-twice kind of thing, but he's only been here for a month and already he's racked up a huge amount of mistakes that he just keeps repeating over and over. If he has read any of the guide lines or help pages, he obviously didn't take them to heart.

I don't mean it to be a personal attack or anything, it's just something that i think should be taken into consideration when weighing the validity of his edits. ~ lav-chan @ 22:31, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

• Comment I believe Lav-Chan has gone a bit too far in the criticisms of the article as blatant POV promotion of religion after the extensive edits done recently. In articles about religions, statements are commonly made such as "Followers of religion X believe Y." There should not be a stricter standard in this regard for some religions than others. If Spiers "accepted Jesus" that is a description of a decision he made one day, and would be standard for an evangelical minister. If it says he felt this or wondered that, or felt blessed, it is not a claim of proof or even advocacy of a religion. Articles about Catholics say some are determined by the church to be Saints. Marian apparitions says several miraculous appearances by Mary have been confirmed by the church as legitimate. The article on John Wesley, Methodist, says he "Felt his heart strangely warmed" while hearing Bible commentary, and quotes him "For fifty years God has been pleased to bless the itinerant plan." A certain latitude should be granted in recounting the lives of religious figures. Certainly POV statements like "And then he went to heaven" or "Jesus spoke to him" should be removed. But Lav-Chan seems to demand there be no mention of God or the subject's religious belief in an article about a pastor, which is rather strange and extreme, in the light of say, the Billy Graham article. A better plan than deletion might be to edit out any remaining POV statements or statements about his life which are unsupported by verifiable sources. Enough well supported facts remain to satisfy WP:BIO. I certainly removed POV statements; sorry if I missed some. That is why xxx made lots of Wikipedia editors!  :-) Edison 06:28, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

• Comment:

That isn't even remotely what i was implying. Statements like 'Jesus spoke to him' are exactly the kind of thing i was talking about; every other example you cited (if i'm to take your word for them, which i will) is perfectly acceptable and nothing i said earlier contradicts that.

Anyway that doesn't even matter if you want to get right down to it. Even if the article is the pinnacle of neutral point of view, it doesn't address the notability issue. You've got three references listed in the article, one of which is an obituary, which certainly does not count for anything since it doesn't assert notability. Another is an article published in a magazine in 1976. Can't find any assertion that the magazine is especially notable outside Oral Roberts's group. No awards, no Web site, no particularly reliable third-party verification that the magazine even existed (although i'm sure it did). And the last one appears to be a personal memorial, although the link isn't working for me so i can't check at the moment.

You mentioned on my talk page (and i'll reply to you there also) that 'Googleism' is a bad habit to get into and that it might just take a while to find good sources off-line. That may be the case, but that's not how Wikipedia works. You can't go around creating articles and promise to find sources for them later. You find the source and then you create the article. If you can find some reliable third-party references for Don Spiers in a notable news paper or magazine article, that's great, go ahead and write his article. But until then, you haven't asserted any notability, so i feel the page should be removed.

(I don't know how this formatting is s'posed to work once you start getting into deeper levels, NauticaShades. Go ahead and fix this for me if you have a better idea of how i should reply.) ~ lav-chan @ 08:48, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: "Jesus" is mentioned exactly twice in the article, and nowhere does the phrase "Jesus spoke to him" appear. It says he "accepted Jesus" which describes something common in all evangelicals, and does not say "Jeses did thus and such. " It also says that a gospel passage is the words of Jesus, hardly an extreme POV. I have done another pass of editing. I cannot find any POV statements in the article which go beyond the standard of stating what a religious person believed or felt, which is seen in all other articles about religious persons. It is legitimate, per your own comment on the talk page of the article's creator, to say "Pastor Spiers felt that Jesus was speaking to him." Nowhere does it state that any supernatural power did anything whatsoever. Please note that I did not create the article. All I have had time to do is Google search. Had I been the creator, I would have started with a university library or large public library. In the past I have even used interlibrary loan to obtain microfilm of foreign newspapers from 1915 to try and come up with a verifiable source for other articles. I never heard of this individual before finding it in AFD. If I see an AFD and it looks like the subject might be notable and verifiable with a little research, or that questions of style might be resolved by editing, I make the effort. Editing to improve articles or to verify claims is supposed to be a goal for Wikipedians. Also please note that I have started a discussion topic at Wikipedia talk:Notability (people) to create a standard for notability of religious leaders. Some should have articles, if, for instance they are an official of their denomination churchwide, or they started some important movement or were notable in ways special to religion. They probably should not have an article if they were just a typical priest, rabbi, or mullah serving a local group. We have such standards for Porn actors and sports figures, and it would save a lot of argumentation. I have also started a discussion for standards of notability for individual churches, also seen all the time in AFD. We have a standard for schools, so why not for churches.Edison 19:50, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

• Comment:

'"Jesus" is mentioned exactly twice in the article, and nowhere does the phrase "Jesus spoke to him" appear.' — No kidding. That was your example, i was just continuing your line of thought. As far as the rest of the POV arguement, yeah, OK, i already gave you that. You did your job, you removed the rest of the stuff i was talking about before. Way to go.

You (and the article's creator) still haven't asserted notability, not even in your as-yet-unadopted notability proposal for religious persons. Being 'an official of their denomination churchwide' doesn't make a person notable, not outside their church anyway. The church itself must be notable, and the official must still have references. You can not add a person to Wikipedia without there being information available on him. It doesn't matter if he's the single most well-known person in all of human history. If there are no reliable published references on him, he doesn't get a Wikipedia article. It's just common sense, people can't edit an article on a subject that has no readily available sources.

I don't have anything against church officials and churches, even minor ones, being added to Wikipedia. And i don't have anything against devising notability standards for the same. But it's all a moot point, because this guy simply has no good references. If you can find your assertion of notability in microfilm or a library, that's awesome. I'll totally retract my opposition to this article. But until then, you've got nothing on the guy. You're apparently banking on the notion that something will be found in the future to assert his notability, and you just can't do that on Wikipedia. Notability comes before you write the article. ~ lav-chan @ 20:41, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

A Big Thank You to all

Hey you guys… I just want to let you all know that it’s been a long after you have tagged it for deletion. Well you can go ahead and delete it as you wish. I don’t want to create a big problem out of this issue. If wikipedia has got thus rules then lets go according to it. I just contributed it thinking it might be useful to all the other readers.Know for sure that I had no intention of promoting any religious stuff in it. It is just some facts of Pastor Don…. Edison first I want to thank you for all the effort you kept doing for this page. And also a big thank you to all the other friends like NauticaShades^(talk), TheRanger, lav-chan, Kf4bdy, Uncle G, GRBerry, The Way, RickReinckens, Buridan …..and many others who have been in and out to see that wikipedia would be a better site and enclyopedia. I would really say from my heart that I do not have any grudge or any kind of bitterness against anybody at all. May be I am a new user, but one day I will be a good old user who keeps doing good thing or even better things that wikipedia would have dreamt of. Thanks a lot. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Rencin24 (talk • contribs) .

Thank you for your kindness and know that things of this nature should not be seen as an attack on your person, everyone here really is just focused on making sure the wikipedia is the best it can be. While I still would vote for a deletion, for much of the same reason as lav-chan, its now due largely to the issue of notability. If the article does stay it needs to be cleaned up a bit more for NPOV issues; I just cleaned up one particularly bad section (despite past claims that its been cleaned, phrases like "accepted Jesus into his heart" and such do support a POV). --The Way 04:39, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

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.