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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 redirect to Rowing at the 1932 Summer Olympics – Men's coxed four. As in the RfC cited by the nominator, consensus here is also that Olympians known only for participating in the games should be covered in appropriate lists rather than in separate articles. Sandstein 10:06, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Francis English (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Per the recent RFC people who competed in the Olympics are only presumed notable if they won a medal. Francis English competed in the men's coxed four at the 1932 Olympic Games, and his team did not finish in a podium position, so not winning a medal. Whilst for other sports there may be other criteria whereby someone might be notable simply because they competed in the Olympics, rowing is not one of these sports, so having (according to single database-listing) competed in the 1932 Olympic games was the only reason this article was ever thought to be notable, a reason that no longer applies.

Looking at the sources in the article shows only a sports-reference.com database listing (which is certainly not significant coverage) and a link to Olympedia, which is also not significant coverage since it consists only of statistical data taken from sports-reference.com (or the same source as it) and a 38-word biography that was likely sourced at least in part to the family of English and contains nothing that would add notability to the subject. Even if Olympedia is thought to be a reliable source (and this is in a bit of doubt given that is is an amateur project), it is a "database [source] with [a] low, wide-sweeping generic [standard] of inclusion" and so excluded from showing notability. This is therefore a WP:BASIC fail as well.

My WP:BEFORE search on Google Books found only bare mentions of English having competed in a junior double-shells competition. A Newspapers.com search also failed to find any relevant results. Other searches came up similarly dry. I considered turning the page into a redirect to Rowing at the 1932 Summer Olympics – Men's coxed four but there are many other equally non-notable people named Francis English (as my searches showed) and it is not a natural redirect, though I can live with this as a redirect if necessary.

This article (and the many thousands of others just like it) is essentially just a database entry transposed from sports-reference.com directly into Wikipedia in prose form, but Wikipedia is not a database. It took less than 2 minutes for the creator to write this article, and in the ten minutes either side of it the creator made eight other near-identical articles. I think it's time we started fixing this issue.

PS - just in case anyone's wondering, I found this article just by clicking on "random article" twice, which shows just how many of these things there are. FOARP (talk) 15:07, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sports-related deletion discussions. FOARP (talk) 15:14, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sportspeople-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 15:25, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Pennsylvania-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 15:25, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Redirect to Rowing at the 1932 Summer Olympics – Men's coxed four and do the same for the rest of the American team (Grossmiller, Drueding, Marshall), Japanese team (Suzuki, Shibata, Takahashi, Ban) and Brazilian team (Castro, Lima, Pereira, Popovitch). The medal-winning teams and the NZ team are notable enough, at a quick glance. There's little reason for the athletes of these three teams to have their own articles if there is no information about them, and as the nominator said, they are just database entries. Maybe there exists some old books where the lives and accomplishments of these athletes are clearly outlined, but until that book is found they do not meet GNG. I personally believe a redirect is the best solution. That way, people who come to search for Francis English is redirect to his event instead of being encouraged to create a page about him. Kaffe42 (talk) 15:43, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment In that RFC it was mentioned by some that we could have a time period to allow editors to expand these articles, or to have a process by which they can be expanded or otherwise acted upon. I think that's worth discussing separately rather than asking editors to expand as-and-when a particular article has been nominated for deletion (I haven't checked whether this particular article could be expanded, but just mentioning it in general). - Simeon (talk) 15:45, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Realistically, the only way these articles are ever going to get sorted through is via checking notability and AFD'ing the failing ones. It's been two months since the RFC and it's not like anything is being done that would put much of a dent in the many thousands of problematic Olympian articles otherwise. Of course I'm not talking about mass-AFDs at the moment. FOARP (talk) 16:37, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Redirect per Kaffe42. Article contains no useful information other than that they competed in that one event. No prejudice towards converting the redirect back to a stand-alone article if and when enough reliable sources are produced to write a decent biography of them. --Jayron32 15:50, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Redirect Delete per nom. Gets some mentions in a history of Penn AC Rowing Association:: https://www.pennac.org/about/history/ (as Frank English). Seems the Penn AC four won a trial and hence represented the US at the Olympics. Found this from 1990 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/90664357/the-philadelphia-inquirer/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/90664125/the-philadelphia-inquirer/ "Frank English, 80, at the stroke as always" which leaves wondering how he could have died in 1984. Clearly a useful rower but nothing here to pass GNG. Nigej (talk) 16:37, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that Nigej. Honestly I think it's worth doing an RSN on Sports-Reference.com at some point. I get the impression that it's assumed to be accurate because the sports stats data matches other data for the eras that we can check, but even if this is true there's more information on there than just sports stats (e.g., the small bios) and its not really clear where it comes from. Here's an example of where the database clearly has an error on it, and doesn't include the name that this guy actually seems to have been known under (assuming these were the same people of course, which is very likely but not 100% certain). FOARP (talk) 16:47, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

One other thing from that story: we used to assume competing in the Olympics was a big thing, even if it was the 1932 games, but the journalist who wrote that story didn't think Frank English worth giving significant coverage to, and didn't even mention that he had already been an Olympian in 1932. FOARP (talk) 10:46, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Redirect or delete, per nom, Kaffe42, and Nigej. JoelleJay (talk) 19:27, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Without proper access to contemporary sources, I can see why this was nominated, but I think that the sources here in and off themselves are sufficient to pass WP:N, particularly considering that most reports of the era would have listed him as "F. English", as was the convention at the time, so at lot of reports are likely being missed. As for the suggestion that Olympedia is not a reliable source, it is run by Bill Mallon, who has written two dozen books on Olympic history and received the IOC's Olympic order in silver for his contributions to sport history. The database is even used by the IOC itself. Yes, there are errors, probably more than a few, but most reliable sources have errors. I'm not saying Olympedia is enough in and of itself to keep any article, that is clearly not the case. I'm just saying that there is no question to its status as a reliable source. Canadian Paul 22:34, 16 December 2021 (UTC)t rhy sh[reply]

Isn’t the truth that we have only one actual source here (sports-reference.com and Olympedia are the same)? Also the data here has a clear error since this guy was apparently still alive in 1990, casting doubt on the accuracy of the only source we have for him. Bill Malon might be an expert (though the main proof of this comes from the IOC) but is he writing or editing every listing? And if so, why this glaring mistake here? FOARP (talk) 06:47, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

For the same reason that CNN published premature obituaries in 2003. Errors happen when working with large datasets. WP:RS requires general reliability, not perfection. As for Mallon's expertise, if you don't think that publishing two dozen books and being recognized by the organization in charge of the topic qualifies as expertise, I'm not sure what source would meet your standards. Canadian Paul 19:32, 18 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

CNN accidentally publishing obits (on the back-end of their website, that they keep in reserve for when the person dies like a lot of news outlets do) doesn’t mean an error here doesn’t cast doubt on the content of this website. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Olympic competition statistics for these old competitors is basically reliable but the biographical stuff is less so, because they ultimately come from different sources. FOARP (talk) 06:30, 20 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep (as per Canadian Paul) or Redirect - I don't have any particular enthusiasm for sports stubs but names of Olympians are likely search terms and it's a reasonable reader expectation that they should be look-up-able on Wikipedia one way or another. Ingratis (talk) 04:59, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment It seems to me that it might be sensible for some of the Olympic events to have articles on the lines of List of rowers at the 1932 Summer Olympics containing the bare biographical details of the rowers. If a rower article only contains minimal details we can redirect the rower article there, and if at some point information comes available that shows that the rower passes WP:N then the article can be created with that new content. In my own area this seems a sensible approach for Golf at the 1904 Summer Olympics – Men's individual where the entries were a selection of useful (and a few not-so-useful) middle-class white American male golfers many of who are no more notable than any other middle-class white American man of the time. Nigej (talk) 08:53, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This would certainly enable a quicker resolution of the issue because (as I understand it) redirecting can be done en masse. However, would this pass WP:LISTN? Can we show that "list of [Sportspeople] at [long-ago Olympic event]" is a pass for that? Probably easier than showing notability for each one though. FOARP (talk) 09:22, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am in favor of this as a second option (and as an alternative to mass AfDs). This makes it easier for editors to build up sources to demonstrate notability and gain consensus for "recreating" the article. Coordination with WP:Olympics could be helpful in this regard. Canadian Paul 19:32, 18 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No, we don't need a separate list article for this. If we're going to do it for all non-medallist rowers, then add a competitors section to Rowing at the 1932 Summer Olympics or the individual event sub-articles, rather than creating a random list article. Joseph2302 (talk) 11:13, 19 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge and redirect into an appropriate target- probably Rowing at the 1932 Summer Olympics – Men's coxed four, although United States at the 1932 Summer Olympics#Rowing would also work. The Olympics was not a professional sport at the time, and so not much is known about him, certainly not enough to pass WP:GNG. Which is probably true for most pre-WWII competitors, as I pointed out at the RFC (and why I suggested at the RFC that only post-WWII athletes should be presumed notable, as it was actually a well-organised event after that, with lots of coverage). Joseph2302 (talk) 12:12, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Missvain (talk) 00:22, 24 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Redirect to Rowing at the 1932 Summer Olympics – Men's coxed four RS here doesn't really establish notability, and the article itself doesn't tell us much. Deathlibrarian (talk) 01:44, 27 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Redirect The burden is on those who want to keep the article to show adequate sourcing to pass GNG. I have at least glanced though almost every article in Wikipedia on people born from 1915-1928, and the vast majority of articles in that time frame with only one source, and a large portion of those for whom we have no information at all if the person is alive or dead or where they have been for the 50+ years from the one thing that caused them to be entered into a database somewhere, are on olympians. We decided that merely entering the olympics is not enough to make one notable. We need signficant reliabe source coverage unless someone wins a medal. We do not have that here. We have a suitable redirect target. Let us do that.John Pack Lambert (talk) 14:10, 28 December 2021 (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.

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