AfD nom for Valley Entertainment Monthly

I noticed the AFD for Valley Entertainment Monthly the other day. Sure, the timing is a bit suss but I have not idea why he nominated it - you'd have to ask him, not me. I see the last AFD wasn't actually closed as keep but as userfy to give you the chance to bring it in line with policy. When an AFD closes as userfy to give the editor more time, it's really not unreasonable to send the article back to AFD for reconsideration if there's any outstanding issues with the article because "userfy" is almost a withdrawal of the AFD and no final decision is reached as to whether it should be kept or not, only an agreement to give the editor a chance to bring it in-line with policy. Come on, you can't have double-standards here and put Martin's article under magnifying glass but expect a free pass yourself for what seems to be very similar problems - quality of sourcing, questionable notability, possible COI, etc. Honestly, if I happened upon that article, I'd be voting to delete it. It doesn't read as an encyclopedia article, there's still some unsourced material there - the Herb and Geronimo and Mr. Morbid's Midnight Review are unsourced and there's other bits of information in other sections that are unsourced, also trivial information (the post office box they used, for example) and the list of contributors seems unnecessary and almost like a reason to get people's names into Wikipedia. The sources also don't look great. Is it true that the paper was published for less than a year and had a circulation of about 1,000? If so, I'd have serious doubts about its notability. Sorry, I know none of this is what you want to hear but it's my honest opinion. I think you would have done better, when you were given the extra time with the userfication, if you'd cut out all the extraneous material about the contributors and condensed it into a small but fully sourced encyclopedic article covering the basic facts only. All the extra stuff gives it an unencyclopedic tone that feels that the newspaper represents a COI for you. I don't think you're approaching it from a neutral perspective or I think you'd recognise the problems. Especially after the magnifying glass you've run over Martin's article, I'd expect you'd apply the same standards to your own articles.

By the way, there's a problem I noticed with this image file: File:Larry Stanley Valley Entertainment Monthly Associate Editor.jpg. I see you wrote on it that "Owner e-mailed permission to Wikipedia, May 17, 2010". I cannot find any record of us ever receiving an email about this image. Did you receive a reply? When we receive permissions via email, we place a special template on the image page which contains information about the ticket. No agent has left a tag on this image file so it's obviously not been processed. If you haven't received a reply to the email, can you, or whoever emailed, please resend it and I will then take care of the licensing for you. If you did receive the reply, you should have received a ticket number, can you please post that here so I can then find the email and process it properly. Thanks. Sarah 04:09, 18 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It took a while, but I was able to locate the widow of the person in the picture. It belongs to her and she said she had e-mailed permission after I provided the e-mail addy for Wiki permissions. If it is not there, I can try and contact her again, but she is the one who told me she took care of it, and there was no reason to doubt her. She seemed happy that Mr. Stanley's picture would go with the article, but now that the article will be deleted, it doesn't even matter. Nineteen Nightmares (talk) 18:25, 18 June 2010 (UTC)Ninteeen Nightmares[reply]

Well, we definitely haven't received it. But I don't think it's worth worrying about bothering her until after the AFD finishes. If the article gets deleted, I'm assumming there won't be any use for it and we can just delete it and if it gets kept, you'll then have to contact her and get her to re-send her email if she wants it to be hosted here, otherwise it will have to be deleted. Incidentally, I'm not sure if you know but unfortunately the Martin article has been taken to deletion review. Apparently some folk aren't done yet and want it to be restored so we can keep arguing at another AFD. See if you're interested in commenting on it. Cheers, Sarah 02:00, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm done with that piece of junk mail. I yelled really loud and finally somebody did something, but between that and working like hell to add an article to the site about a small paper I used to read, its been exhausting and it is apparent a lot of people spend a lot of time here wasting the time of other people who are attempting to be productive, which is entirely counter-productive. There has been nearly no help from any of the tagging editors, even though the rules they love to cite say you should at least try to explain what somebody did wrong and let them correct it before you start tagging and deleting. The way editors around here attack an article like frenzied sharks is insane. Wikipedia really ought to clean up the site in terms of this type of "concensus" building for articles Nineteen Nightmares (talk) 05:58, 19 June 2010 (UTC)Nineteen Nightmares[reply]

I'm not going to go over all the sources discussed in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Valley Entertainment Monthly (2nd nomination) again, but I do want to discuss two of those sources in particular. There are many sites out there, known as mirrors or forks of Wikipedia, which copy the content of Wikipedia, which is legal under the copyright licenses we use. However, according to Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks, "Mirrors and forks are not reliable sources and may not be listed as external links in articles." (After all, they are just copying Wikipedia, and Wikipedia can't be used to prove that Wikipedia is accurate.)

In the case of Answers.com, the page cited was http://www.answers.com/topic/turlock-california and that page does indeed say, "Valley Entertainment Monthly, an entertainment newspaper covering the Central Valley, was published in Turlock in the early 1990s." However, looking at the Answers.com page, it has several sections: Dictionary, Columbia Encyclopedia, Weather, Shopping, and Wikipedia. At the bottom of the Wikipedia section, it says, "This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)", and lower on the page, it says, "Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Turlock, California." This "Wikipedia" section came directly from the Wikipedia article Turlock, California. Comparing the Answers.com page and the Wikipedia page, the articles appear to be virtually identical. Furthermore, the "Media" section which is what the Valley Entertainment Monthly article was citing was added to Turlock, California by User:Nineteen Nightmares. [1] In other words, you wrote the passage you were citing as a reference, except that you wrote it on Wikipedia, and Answers.com then legally copied it under license.

Similarly, for Duckduckgo.com, this page says, "Valley Entertainment Monthly - Valley Entertainment Monthly was an American newspaper published in Turlock, California which featured articles and reviews on topics such as music, movies, and comic books as well as other ... " You should probably recognize this as the beginning of the lead sentence of the Wikipedia article Valley Entertainment Monthly. And clicking on the words "Valley Entertainment Monthly" will take you to a page that says, "Valley Entertainment Monthly was an American newspaper published in Turlock, California which featured articles and reviews on topics such as music, movies, and comic books as well as other forms of popular entertainment. More at Wikipedia" In other words, Duckduckgo.com got all their information about VEM from Wikipedia, too.

The reason I have gone into such detail about these mirror sites is that pretty much every mainspace page on Wikipedia is going to get mirrored on one or more other sites. It's important to be able to recognize mirror sites as such so that one doesn't try to cite them on Wikipedia. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 01:55, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some Questions Exactly how many cites does a subject need anyway? Isn't it something like two? The article has two solid ones. The Flipside article is being ignored like it is nothing. That is a nationally distributed monthly magazine as I've tirelessly pointed out, but you are focused on some small things, which I find ridiculously petty, but I respect your right to your opinion, obviously. The Hughson Chronicle announcement of the first issue is no joke either. I just think the material is not being reviewed properly. How common is it that a small publication like that would nonetheless have interviews and/or contributions from internationally famous rock musicians (Rick Wakeman, Country Dick Montana!, Ian Moore, Quiet Riot, Kevin Dubrow now deceased), the creators or Spider-Man (Stan Lee) and Green Lantern (Mart Nodell), a nationally syndicated psychic, a column by a leading UFO researcher at the time, as well as a particularly gory column specifically about B-grade slasher films? It looks like it will be deleted and I'm not going to get worked up over it, it isn't that important. But it turned out to be one hell of a learning experience and that's a really good thing. With that said however, I have to add that the publication described above would only be considered non-notable by an idiot. Just my opinion, don't take it personally. Nineteen Nightmares (talk) 05:48, 19 June 2010 (UTC)Nineteen Nightmares[reply]

Hello, Nineteen Nightmares. This message is being sent to inform you that there currently is a discussion at Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.

Please do not attack other editors, as you did at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2010 June 18. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thank you. I already gave you an informal warning about making malicious, unfounded accusations, now here's a formal one. If you wish to file an SPI, by all means do so via the correct channels. Be sure to provide reliable evidence and if necessary you may ask for a checkuser. However before doing so I would suggest you look at the contribution histories for the three accused parties, myself, GregJackP, and Minor4th, and consider whether your are filing a valid concern or simply making a personal attack because you disagree with our arguments; I think it is abundantly clear to everyone now that it is the latter. GiftigerWunsch [TALK] 18:02, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]