Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/SlashGear

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. JohnCD (talk) 16:03, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

SlashGear[edit]

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No indication of notability, only sources are first party. Prod declined without explanation by an IP. Safiel (talk) 21:57, 31 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - I agree with the nominator. SlashGear seems like a good source of info, and SlashGear even has and editorial team, but they just aren't there yet for notability. Paviliolive (talk) 22:12, 31 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Primary sources can not confer notability. I don't see anything obvious in a Google search, but it's sometimes difficult to find stories about popular websites. Its popularity will probably lead eventually to it becoming notable, as define by Wikipedia, but it looks toosoon right now. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 22:58, 31 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Websites-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 03:16, 1 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Weak keep - After seeing an article using SlashGear as a source, I Googled to see what it was, and was specifically hoping for (and found) a Wikipedia article. I happened to notice the AFD banner and figured I should let you know at least one person out there had been looking for the article. Unfortunately the article itself is a bit of a stub and didn't really have much useful for me - thus the weak. Certainly room for improvement. 2601:A:5E00:406:D552:708:106E:FA1 (talk) 04:25, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Delete (see comments below for reason for change). I don't think it meets the notability criteria of WP:WEBSITE (e.g. I don't think it's won any awards) or WP:COMPANY, but news sources and publishers are two subtypes of websites/companies that I think slip through the cracks of Wikipedia's existing notability guidelines. When a news site produces works that are widely cited in other reliable source works, even though those are essentially one-sentence trivial "this exists" mentions, the citations themselves, cumulatively, can be evidence of the site's significance. Those cites also create a reason that people will want to look up encyclopedic information about the site; for example I frequently rely on Wikipedia to determine whether a publisher is a vanity press or a serious academic publisher, which even a stub article typically answers. Note that I'm considering only reliable sources. In this case, a books.google.com search showed about 40 books that cited SlashGear articles; maybe ten or so are self-published junk books (super rough estimate – I was judging books by their covers!). A scholar.google.com search showed an estimated 50 or more US patent filings that cited SlashGear articles, and I'd guess at least a dozen journal articles or academic conference papers that did so. It is briefly mentioned as a site in itself rarely in such papers; e.g. "BlogNEER: Applying Named Entity Evolution Recognition on the Blogosphere" from Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives (2013) utilized a “techblog dataset” consisting of “five popular tech blogs covering five years from 2008 to 2013, fetched from Google Reader: TechCrunch, Gizmodo, SlashGear, Ubergizmo and GottaBeMobile.” A generic Google web search is much more tedious separating the reliable sources from blogs and other nonsense, but spot-checking citations from well–known sources is a useful benchmark. Searching for "slashgear site:latimes.com", for example, shows 20 or so Los Angeles Times articles that cite or mention SlashGear over the past 5 years; the Wall Street Journal has maybe 30 such articles. Again, the references may be trivial, but the fact that the LA Times and Wall Street Journal referenced them so many times differentiates SlashGear from your grandma's knitting blog. So while I can't state a notability guideline criterion that makes this a slam dunk, in my opinion SlashGear is notable “enough” based simply on its widespread media citations. ––Agyle (talk) 07:13, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Agyle has once again made a fairly persuasive argument, but I think that this is a much better argument for conclusively establishing that the site is a reliable source than for notability. WP:WHYN does a good job of discussing why notability is important; without significant coverage, we have to resort to primary sources for all our information. I guess we could turn the article into a micro-stub of one sentence, but what's the point? As WHYN says, it's better to merge or delete the article and wait for significant coverage. Dread Central was deleted for lack of notability a few years ago, but I was able to successfully find enough sources to recreate the article in 2013. Popular web sites have a way of eventually getting significant coverage. It will eventually come, and there's no hurry. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 02:21, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  - I've reconsidered. I was going to respond that even a short stub is useful for a site so widely cited, and I assumed there would be enough material for that, but I can't find a reliable, independent source to reference even a single sentence about the topic. It's level of non-coverage is somewhat remarkable! Income Diary has an interview with some info, but even if that were considered a reliable source, all the info is from the interview, making it effectively another primary source. ––Agyle (talk) 10:40, 8 February 2014 (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.