Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/VF/religious stations

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. MBisanz ^talk 12:21, 23 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

VF/religious stations

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

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As with Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/VF/TIS stations, this is a cleanup of old content which was once fully compliant with WP:NMEDIA's rules for the notability of radio stations at the time of creation, but is no longer compliant with the tighter rules that apply today. As the issues are slightly different, however, I'm listing these as a separate batch — unlike tourist information stations, NMEDIA does not deprecate religious stations as automatically non-notable, but these are a particular type of religious station which still fails the other reason why I listed the TIS group: VF stations in Canada are essentially the same thing as Part 15 stations in the United States, and thus do not get an automatic presumption of notability under NMEDIA just for existing, but become eligible for articles only if they can be shown to pass WP:GNG. Once upon a time, the thing that made them different was that VF stations actually did have to have a conventional CRTC license, which made them eligible to be considered notable on the same basis as any other radio station — however, as of 2013 a change in CRTC regulations removed that requirement from church stations (it had already been removed earlier from some other classes of VF, like TIS or weather radio stations), making them now fully equivalent to a Part 15 and leading to the deprecation of VFs as non-notable in WP:BCASTOUTCOMES. For our needs, a VF station's operational status is nearly always entirely unverifiable to any published reliable sources anymore — one of these could now stop operating at absolutely any time without Wikipedia having any way to verify that, because the cessation isn't going to be announced by the CRTC in a public release and there's virtually never any substantive coverage anywhere else. Typically, these stations are licensed to churches, and exist primarily to broadcast religious services so that elderly shut-ins who can't physically get to the church can "attend" mass from home — but they otherwise remain silent when there isn't actually a mass on, meaning they're of no substantive public interest otherwise. And if a station's status as still active or not is unverifiable to us, then we can't keep an article about it anymore either. Delete all. Bearcat (talk) 20:55, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Radio-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 21:01, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 21:01, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all; I was considering a bulk nomination of these low-power religious stations myself, but didn't get around to it. It has been suggested that VF stations are not inherently notable, and I can't imagine these church stations that exist solely to broadcast religious celebrations will ever attain the significant coverage in reliable sources to meet the general notability guideline. In addition the VF8020 article claims that the station is defunct, and notes that the CRTC revoked the license at the request of the church that owned it — but the CRTC decision specifically notes that the revocation was requested specifically because these stations are now exempt from CRTC licensing, and that the station would remain in operation as an exempt undertaking, meaning that the station was not defunct and at the time had no plans on actually shutting down. While these VF stations still require Industry Canada authorization on a technical level from what I can tell, that simply indicates that they exist on paper; other that that, they are practically non-notable unlicensed low-power stations whose operations are effectively unverifiable at this point. --WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 21:22, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Although VF8027 was incorporated in this nomination, it now has two AfD tags on it because it already has an AfD nomination on its own; this may need to be fixed. --WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 21:26, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Whoops, sorry, in my middle-aged premature dementia I completely overlooked that I'd already nominated that one separately yesterday. I've removed it from this batch and stripped the second AFD template. Bearcat (talk) 21:57, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Bearcat and Wcquidditch: Are Canadian VF stations like our translators here in the US? If so, the pages could all be redirected to their parent station with the VF stations in a {{RadioTranslators}} template. - Neutralhomer • Talk • 13:25 on August 16, 2016 (UTC)

No, they aren't. This call sign format just denotes that the transmitter is very low power; translators can sometimes be named this way in small villages where they only need VF-level wattage to cover everyone, but so can very low power stations originating non-commercial programming (TIS, weather, mass-for-shut-ins, etc.) under our equivalent to US Part 15 rules, and the latter is what these are. The unusual call sign format only announces the strength of the signal, not whether the transmitter is broadcasting original content or just repeating another station. Bearcat (talk) 15:17, 16 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, gotcha. I thought those were Canada's answer to our translators and the callsign was just Canada's answer to our W201AA type calls. But if they are the equivalent of our Part 15's, then yeah, non-notable. I think Part 15's are even mentioned in NMEDIA. With that, Delete. - Neutralhomer • Talk • 15:57 on August 17, 2016 (UTC)

No worries. Just for future reference, there's no absolutely foolproof way to identify a translator/rebroadcaster in Canada just by its call sign alone, as any call sign format that can be held by a translator station can also be held by an originating one as well. Even the one call sign format that theoretically is uniquely identifying of a translator, the existing call sign of another station with an extra numeric suffix attached to it (e.g. CXXX-FM-2), also has a couple of oddball exceptions where a onetime translator later became a real originating station in its own right without actually changing its original call sign — so even the genuine "rebroadcaster" class of call signs still isn't a fully reliable flag. Bearcat (talk) 16:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Delete All - For the same reasons as stated above, fails multiple guidelines including WP:N, WP:RS, WP:NMEDIA.... -- Dane2007 ^talk 18:51, 22 August 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.