Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wendell Brown

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 keep‎. (non-admin closure) Let'srun (talk) 04:52, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wendell Brown

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This article reads like a press release or a resume. It appears to have originally been created by the subject's spouse, and then worked on by someone who also created and worked on the spouse's page. There are too many missing or questionable citations, notably omits association with any business failures or scandals (like SoftRAM), and many other edits appear to have been made by the subject or someone close to the subject. Strip away these parts of the article and and it doesn't seem like the subject merits a standalone wiki article. Dharmabumstead (talk) 02:32, 1 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Businesspeople, Technology, Internet, New York, and West Virginia. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 02:54, 1 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Lean keep. This article does read like a puff piece, but there seems to be a core of facts in it that suggests the subject is indeed notable. He was certainly a software engineer in the 1980's—I found him listed as the author on the instruction booklet for Nova Blast, but not on Beauty and the Beast (which didn't credit anyone, so that doesn't refute the claim)—and while most of the sources cited are suboptimal, they do appear to demonstrate that Brown was a founder of some companies, most of which have since been gobbled up by bigger companies. I note that the claim that he was a co-founder of Teleo is misleading: that article originally listed the company's actual founders, and was later edited, apparently because Teleo merged with another company that Brown did co-found.

I didn't investigate all of the sources listed—many are archived company profiles or minor organizations that I would expect to say nothing more than that Brown was a speaker or participant, without saying anything detailed about him. And some of the major news sites don't mention him when discussing the companies he's supposed to have been involved with—that doesn't mean he's not involved; just that his involvement isn't central to the story, and that suggests that his importance to those companies is exaggerated. His home town newspapers have limited value: small town newspapers aren't known for independent fact checking. On the other hand, I'm not too concerned about non-independent editing: the two early contributors that seem to have been connected to the subject—one of which does appear to be Brown's spouse—haven't contributed to Wikipedia since 2013, and the articles on Brown and his spouse seem to have different contributors in recent years.

My general impression is that this article is in need of a major overhaul, but that there is something salvageable here, and nothing that is obviously a deliberate falsification—so rather than dynamiting it, keep it so that it can be improved. P Aculeius (talk) 15:40, 1 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Aside from the fact that the article was originally written by his family, and appears to have been augmented over the years by someone who may have been employed by the subject *and* his spouse: is this article worth salvaging? If you removed all of the misleading/unsourced/poorly sourced material from the article (which seems to be nearly all of it), does the subject pass the notability test? Dharmabumstead (talk) 04:49, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Notability isn't determined by the state of sourcing in an article. WP:BEFORE requires a diligent search for reliable sources, not merely dismissing the ones that currently exist. Based on what I could verify just by perusing a few of the sources cited, and checking the one I actually had at home—that I had one potentially citeable source amazes me—I'm satisfied that he's at least somewhat notable.
you can't lump all of the sources together and treat them the same way, as though they all have the same problems. Each one has to be judged individually—some are perfectly good sources for part of what they're cited for, such as what a company does or did or what happened to it; some are good sources for the fact that the subject had some involvement with the company, but don't add anything further; some look like they'd contain valid biographical data, but may be difficult to access online—and you can't delete sources merely because they only exist in print form, or you don't have access to the libraries/resources that possess copies. Many of the sources cited look citeable for this article, even though they should be reviewed as to what they do and don't adequately support.
You haven't stated the basis for your assertion that the article "appears to have been augmented over the years by someone who may have been employed by the subject *and* his spouse". It's pretty clear that the article was started by someone close to the subject, and edited by his spouse up to 2013. But it's been ten years since they were regular contributors to Wikipedia, and there are lots of edits since then. And as the subject appears to be notable, the solution to poor or potentially biased writing or sourcing is to improve it—not delete it. And there's no time limit for improving articles.

Perhaps some sources should be removed, but others just need to be edited in terms of what they say or how they're cited; others can be replaced with better ones. The result may well be pared down from its current size, but careful editing means making sure not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And please note: it is not the responsibility of other participants in an AfD to do the editing to salvage an article in need of extensive improvement. It's the nominator's responsibility to show that the article can't be salvaged—and given that the subject appears to be notable and has at least some valid sources, the article is presumptively salvageable. P Aculeius (talk) 13:27, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. This article needs help with editing, formatting and additional reference sources, but I believe the subject is clearly notable. I did brief searches yesterday and today and found more than a dozen published secondary, reliable sources about the subject dating as far back as a 1979 Kilobaud Microcomputing magazine article about him as well as Byte (magazine), InfoWorld, and Computerworld articles on his work in the 1980s and 1990s. Also found several books including from Univeristy of CA Press that describe his notable inventions and contributions in the tech world particularly on the Macintosh in the 1980s, video game creations, and on VoIP technology in the 1990s and 2000s. I started adding to the article to help improve it and will continue to do so, but with the busy holiday season now it will take a while. SanDiegoHangul (talk) 16:17, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I Googled for a missing citation and a source came right up, plus others like one from Computerworld describes Brown as an "Internet messaging pioneer" along with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. These along with sources in the existing references demonstrate notability within his industry. He's not widely known like others, but fame and notability are different. The ease with which I found new reference sources tells me that adding more shouldn't be a problem. But the article's structure needs to be rearranged and tidied to read like a standard biographical article. Yoldivo (talk) 21:48, 4 November 2023 (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.