Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Finnegan the Poet

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. -- Cirt (talk) 00:10, 8 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Finnegan the Poet[edit]

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Doesn't appear to meet notability requirements. ~~Article has some minor secondary sources that establish that the guy exists, writes poetry, and has performed at poetry events~~After checking sources and deleting those that don't actually mention him, sourcing is minimal - a couple of brief entries in pages that probably wouldn't be considered RSs, and a ref to 1992 Vanity Fair (print edition) that I'm not able to check. On Googling I can't find anything to suggest that he meets any of the notability criteria suggested under WP:CREATIVE. Some of the sources cited don't even mention him.

Article also has tone issues and appears to be the subject of an edit war involving one of the subject's ex-es, but those could be fixed if we had anything substantial by way of RSes. GenericBob (talk) 14:29, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete as above. It's a miracle for the ages this article has survived this long. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 14:36, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete seconded here. This is an excellent example of why WP has a deletion policy in the first place. --tgeller (talk) 16:30, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete I agree, this article does not deserve its own Wiki entry; it's simply a biography for a minor poet who has not made "significant contributions or theories" per the Wikipedia guidelines and publishes only to a severely limited audience. His source links do not mention him and are simply links to venues and clubs that any person would put on their facebook page. The one quote that allegedly mentions him in the NY Times isn't even confirmable that he is the same Finnegan who posted this entry. He deserves a user entry, but not a general wiki entry-- Paul W 16:30, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

comment Is there any evidence that his collections were actually published by someone other than himself? If real publishers had published that many of his collections, he might be notable. But if that's all self-published (or vanity-press published), it's pretty much evidence that he's not notable. Argyriou (talk) 17:26, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- According to the article they're by "Dark Star Crew", which is owned and run by Finnegan himself, and thus self-published. Googling though yields nothing at all on the supposed books, so for all we know they might be imaginary or xerox sheets handed out to friends. Given that the article implies he's been active as a poet for two decades it's shocking how little verifiable info there is on the guy, even mere existance is hard to truly verify. One might even consider it a hoax or at the very least extreme self-exaggeration. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 23:21, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  - My bad for not being a better wikipedia editor and citing them correctly, am attempting to get the correct information on them now. Just FYI the items listed are NOT self-published or vanity-press published. They are all from LGBT/Progressive Small-press, one group was under the imprint of an LGBT Non-profit and two of them were published in Europe. But what makes it dificult is that none of them have an on-line edition. CyntWorkStuff (talk) 20:34, 5 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - A self-promotion piece by a self-styled poet who lacks notability. AlexTiefling (talk) 22:22, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - Obvious self-promotion of a non-notable person. Google yields only a range of other attempts at self-promotion, certainly no notable mentions. All his "published" works (if they even exist) appear to be highly dubious self-publishing attempts without any mention from independent sources. His "performances" are mostly a list of venues and appear to be of the quality of "open mic" nights/events where anyone can perform. There is absolutely no argument for this person's notability except perhaps from his own narcissism. Autumnalmonk (talk) 23:51, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Poetry-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:48, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:49, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Agreed. This almost reads more like a press release than a Wiki entry. Cassius235 (talk) 14:02, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Clearly self-puffery from a non-notable self-styled "personality". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dakiwiboid (talk • contribs) 16:42, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Full disclosure, I am the original author and occasionally stop by to edit/update this article. Over the years I have been attempting to steadily build up a more complete library of articles about various subjects relating to the bisexual community, a very under-represented subject. This piece is one of these articles.

This is a writer/performance artist who is notable within the (primarily) English-speaking LGBT/Bisexual community. Over the years he has been well thought of enough to be mentioned in the in the New York Times, have pieces done on him Vanity Fair, a major Village Voice piece, a (Dutch) Photo-essay as well as to have continuous mention in publications directed at the LGBT Community. However one of the reasons I continue to stop by this page is I keep finding vandalism, as well as deletions of primary sources along with fairly unique reasoning (for example "no way to tell if it is this particular individual?" Well, suppose same could be said about any number of sources . . .).

Additionally, with greatest respect, I am a trifle curious as to how the person who proposed the deletion knows so much about the personal life of the subject that he feels free to suggest that there is an edit war with "one of the subject's ex-es"? I have never seen any mention of this. Tediously checking back I see comments that might, if you wished to analyze vandalism, maybe possibly be attributed to a jealous professional rival. So I must wonder how he might have come by this knowledge. I do know that all LGBT articles are subject to a great deal of malicious vandalism so it seems curious that in this case that a someone might have some undocumented inside info in this particular case. CyntWorkStuff (talk)

Happy to satisfy your curiosity - the article links to the subject's LiveJournal, which discusses said edit war in some detail. I quote (with apologies for the language): "Finnegan here. Still glowing richly with the vital, crucial, utter banishment of Miguel. Finally, the worthless toe-rag was scared away from vandalizing my Wikipedia Page! ... Bloody Hell, the sleazy brainless bitch wouldnt go away or stop fucking with me for a whole year after it was long vividly clear that we were history, and had broken up." He also mentions it at [1][2] and quite possibly elsewhere.

You say he is "well thought of enough to be mentioned in the New York Times" - are you referring to this article, which features a one-sentence soundbite from a teenager named Finnegan? Even assuming it's the same Finnegan, that's a far cry from notability. --GenericBob (talk) 02:59, 2 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for answering me and Oh. I didn't know that was there. But for what it is worth I also think that is an (unfounded) supposition. A variety of the same vandalism has been going on for a while (longer than that time period) and I'd guess it is a (or several?) professional rival from the wording. Just as a side note, that (complaining/defacing wikipedia articles) of rivals turns out to be a more common happening than one might suppose.

Also yes, it is the same Finnegan (the now confused subject of the article has been induced to place a note onto the talk page of the main article to attest to that). Additionally, either that article or another one from the NY Times from back in the "print" days also had him as the primary photo subject to go with the article, but I don't know how to properly footnote that.

And actually that is quite a bit of the problem with the article IMHO. I am not sure how to cite things that are (a) not on-line (b) small press/non-profit (c) overseas, for example the "Voices from The Other Side" is a multi-year set put out by some subset of NYC's LGBT Community Center. So some of the "notability" stuff may just be a combination of some really slipshod editing and additions over the years as well as my initial add where I wasn't ever clear on how to cite things I couldn't link to. CyntWorkStuff (talk)

Citation templates might be useful for citing off-line sources. The catch with small-press sources is that they don't always satisfy WP:N and/or WP:V (depending on whether they're being used to establish notability of a subject, or to back up a particular statement of fact). It's particularly an issue with biographies of living people. --GenericBob (talk) 08:05, 2 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sexuality and gender-related deletion discussions. —CyntWorkStuff (talk) 02:58, 2 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Strong Keep That this is even happening really makes my blood boil. This is a performance artist and poet which is already not a real high-profile gig like say someone real important who much like a trained seal bounces a soccer ball on their head or something. But this guy is know and performs in many countries on three continents (America, Europe Australia) for a long time. Have YOU been part of the Next Wave Festival at BAM? Do YOU have write-ups in the NY Times, the Village Voice, Vanity Fair and other places? No? Well he does. And this deleting footnotes thing because you are "not sure if it's the same person" and announcing that only on-line credits and articles are "acceptable" to establish notability? SMH I have never even heard of someone coming up with those excuses on here. Giving you "A" for creativity on those ideas, yo.

comment I am getting very sick of the constant picking at and vandalism of any and all LGBT entries on here. And then we have the extra added attraction of people, even those who you think should know better, trying to delete anything and everything that has the word bisexual on it. I suggest that people go read Bisexual erasure and think about it. Plus I am really trying hard to assume good faith but can't help but notice that this is a frequently vandalized article AND that more than the usual number of people on here who are slavering for deletion have newly minted accounts. Not saying I can prove anything but if the sock fits . . . BiAndBi (talk) 20:11, 4 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

comment Please read more carefully before making accusations of bad faith.

(1) Nobody has stated that offline sources are unacceptable - in fact I specifically offered info on how to cite them!

(2) "More than the usual number of people on here who are slavering for deletion have newly minted accounts" - looking at edit histories, I find precisely one account that fits that description. Going by the edit histories, the other 'delete' comments come from accounts dating back to 2004 (x3), 2005 (x2), 2006, 2009 (x2) and July this year, so this accusation doesn't hold up. But if you still believe anybody here is abusing socks, you have the option of filing an investigation request at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations.

As to the timing of the deletion discussion: the article came to my attention as a consequence of this post by Finnegan. Somebody who saw it mentioned that he had a Wikipedia page, I checked it out, and felt it didn't meet notability standards, so I nominated it. Maybe that post was triggered by the vandalism, maybe the timing is a coincidence - you'd have to ask Finnegan that.

(3) The only NY Times link provided in the article was one that briefly quotes a teenager named "Finnegan". It was not an article about him; even if we were to suppose that "shares part of the name, same city, same sexual orientation" is sufficient to meet WP:V, it doesn't establish notability. Of the other sources offered in the article, one no longer exists and another turned out not to mention him at all. Of the four sources that remain, three are brief entries in 'directory' style pages. The only one that I haven't been able to check is a reference to a 1992 Vanity Fair article.

On Googling "finnegan the poet", the first few hits are: Finnegan's webpage, his Wikipedia page and related material, one brief profile, a passing mention to an open-mic performance, and a bunch of Wikipedia mirror sites. A BLP needs to establish notability and it needs enough reliable sources to offer a balanced perspective on the subject - this article doesn't have either. Without solid sources, we're left with vandalism on the one side, and Finnegan's review of his own performances on the other... that's not the standard WP is trying to achieve. --GenericBob (talk) 00:00, 5 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

- - - Peace people, please. The editor did actually say that they indeed "Assumed good faith" so why not take them at their word, since that is way you wish to be taken too? You must realize that items with the topic of bisexuality are continually under attack and marked for deletion (BiNet USA, Kyle Schickner, Celebrate Bisexuality Day to name just three of many examples) many times by various troll-ish forces, and in the words of one wikipedia editor "the bisexual community is the poor bastard child of the gay rights community -- that is, they get respect neither from the straight community nor from the gay community -- for various reasons. Ergo, their size and reach as determined by Google and Alexa (admittedly low) is not necessarily reflective of their notability, longevity, and importance". So after a while this tends to make editors concerned with this topic jumpy and suspicious. IMHO the reason this doesn't look notable is in many ways due to confusion on how to properly cite an article which for whatever reason just doesn't have a lot of on-line references but does have some solid hard-copy ones. CyntWorkStuff (talk) 21:33, 5 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, BiandBi said that s/he was "trying to assume good faith". S/he then went on to make broad-brush allegations of sockpuppetry, vandalism, biphobia and throw around remarks like "never even heard of someone coming up with these excuses... giving you an A for creativity", none of which are compatible with AGF. I appreciate that a lot of bi-related articles are under attack - I encountered similar issues back when I worked on other sexuality-related articles, under a different account* - but that does not mean every challenge to a bi-related article should be interpreted as biphobia. It's particularly inappropriate when at least one of the 'delete' commenters is themselves bisexual.

I agree that the media have their coverage biases (+crime, ++sport, -creative/intellectual, -bi, etc etc) so if we're looking at Google hits to establish notability, I would certainly give more leeway to an article of this sort than to the footballer of the week. Problem is, even for systematically undercovered fields, we still need to set the bar somewhere. Otherwise Wikipedia becomes a promo vehicle for every self-published poet, unpublished novelist, and garage band in existence, which is not somewhere I want to go.

It's more problematic with a BLP because we need enough sources to provide balanced coverage. We don't accept poorly-cited negative material for good and obvious reasons, and if we want a balanced article that means we shouldn't be accepting poorly-cited positive material either. When I read a bio, one of the first things I want to know is "what makes this person stand out?" If I'm reading about a poet, that might translate to - does he draw large audiences? Has he influenced the way other poets write? Has he won awards for his work? Have reviewers singled him out for favourable comment?

At present, all I've seen about that is anonymous, uncited criticism on one hand (reverted, as it ought to be) and, on the other, Finnegan's uncited report of his own 'huge success' and another anonymous uncited report that "horrible in-house politics" brought a gig to an untimely end. Both of those also need to be removed if the article survives the deletion process; I would have done it already, but I'm getting tired of being accused of biphobia/racism/vandalism/whatever, so I'm holding off to see whether that process makes it a moot point. Strip out the uncited subjective material, and what's left boils down to "he's published books, travelled around giving performances, and shown up to a lot of open-mikes" - which anybody can do if they have the money for self-publishing and airline tickets. The article doesn't tell us whether anybody has bought those books or hung around to listen to his performances, much less what they thought of it. In a better world maybe the media would have different priorities and it'd be easier to find cites for that sort of thing, but we have to work with what we have.

*Created for privacy reasons, used in accordance with WP:SOCK and declared to the appropriate folk... in case anybody was wondering. --GenericBob (talk) 23:06, 5 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I created an account to participate in this discussion (and I apologize in advance if I'm not using the markup properly), but I'm not a sock. I'm happy to provide any details of who I am, in private. I haven't had communication with Finnegan in years. I'd just like to participate in making sure at least the basic facts are clear, and I leave it to others to decide whether he's "notable" or not.

I knew Finnegan back in the 90's. I can attest that the NY Times article's Finnegan is indeed this same Finnegan. The print version of that article included a picture of him. I also remember reading a print version of Sassy (the teenage girl mag) which was about the Dark Star Crew, finnegan's poetry in performance group at the time. Again, it included a picture of the group. That would have been around 1993. I attended quite a few Dark Star Crew performances at NYC venues. I would describe Finnegan as someone who was widely known in the poetry circles of NYC in the nineties when I was there. And I can also attest to the chapbooks put out by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Center of NYC -- I have several of them still sitting on my bookshelves! They were not self-published, they were published by the center. Maybe someone from there can confirm this? http://www.gaycenter.org/

Again, I have no opinion about whether he's notable or not since the Wiki guidelines on that seem vague (what's "significant"?) and I'm not a Wiki participant (until now). I just wated to attest that some of the sources being questioned do indeed exist as I have seen and heard them with my own eyes and hears.

Knewfinneganbackwhen (talk) 04:26, 6 October 2010 (UTC) knewfinneganbackwhen[reply]

Tweaked the indents on your comment to align it (hope you don't mind, and apologies in advance if you do :-)

I can't speak for other editors, but I would be a lot happier about the article if it was based on published sources of that sort (and the unsourced material trimmed). There might still be some argument about notability, but at least we'd be able to put it on a solid foundation. (BTW, has his profile lowered since the '90s? Seems like there are a lot more sources from the '90s than there are from the last 10 years, which might explain why I couldn't find much online.)

One thing Wikipedia can't use as a source is personal testimony from editors. It's annoying sometimes but there are good reasons for it; although it makes it harder to add fact, it also makes it a lot harder on vandals and attention-seekers. (As an example, over on Talk:Peter Foster a few months back we had one editor trying to impersonate a Daily Mail journalist who had close personal knowledge of the subject. It's not always possible to catch those people, which is why the verifiability policy essentially says that none of us can be trusted; we have to provide independent verification of claims we make.)

In the case of the NYT article, this means that we can't go on an editor's say-so that the subject (or that editor) is the same Finnegan. But I think there's a way to sidestep the issue on this occasion - WP:SELFPUB states that we can use people as sources on themselves in certain limited circumstances. If the only purpose of this cite is to establish where he went to school, that would qualify, so we can just cite it to his website (as I've now done). --GenericBob (talk) 12:53, 6 October 2010 (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.