Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bradley Baumkirchner

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 Bradley Baumkirchner, Marla Duran, & Katherine Gerdes; no consensus, default keep, on Keith Michael, Daniel Franco, & Santino Rice. See also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Marla Duran, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Keith Michael, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Katherine Gerdes, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Daniel Franco, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Santino Rice. —Centrx→talk • 23:59, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bradley Baumkirchner

Merged nominations per request for Marla Duran, Keith Michael, Katherine Gerdes, Daniel Franco, Santino Rice. It's a slight mess due to votes and comments since the original nominations, but I've tried to tidy them up and regroup the reason for deleting each article where I can. Could an administrator close off the individual AfDs below which are now summarised here, thanx Ohconfucius

Proposed Realitycrufts deletion. The subject, and co-nominees are non-notable designer contestants on Project runway, who do not appear to have an existence outside of PR. 212 unique Ghits out of 502 for

"Bradley Baumkirchner" + designer, the overwhelming majority was blog entries.

"Marla Duran" + designer scores 662Ghits of which 251 unique. Of these, the vaaast majority are where PR is the primary subject of the article, then come a fairly abundant Blog entries, and a few listings in directories for the Bethlehem area.

• Comment Could you please combine these deletions? It's a pain in the ass to separate votes that are all on very similar criteria. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 06:52, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

"Keith Michael" + designer scores 44200Ghits of which 541 unique. He was the first person to be given a dishonourable discharge from the contest for cheating. Of these, the overwhelming majority of Ghits were Blog entries, and a few articles where the show or the incident was the primary subject. His website has an Alexa rank of 2,178,220.

• Delete per nom. TJ Spyke 07:10, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

"Katherine Gerdes" +designer scores 774Ghits, of which 242 unique.

"Kayne Gillaspie" +designer scores 548 Ghits of which 243 unique. Of these, the overwhelming majority are where PR is the primary subject of the article and a fairly abundant number of Blog entries. Ohconfucius 05:39, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: Per Project Runway (season 3), Kayne is still in the competition. szyslak (t, c, e) 08:29, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment I take the line that reality show contestants are not inherently notable unless they are the winner and/or have some notability outside of it. Ohconfucius 08:42, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

"Daniel Franco" + designer scores 18900Ghits of which 638 unique. Alexa rank in the 4.28 millionths for danielfranco.com.

• Delete. (Thanks, Ohconfucius, for the research.) Two years from now, who will care? --Sean Lotz 09:06, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Santino Rice: Arrogant second runner-up in Project Runway.

In almost all cases, the vast majority of Ghits were for Blog entries, vox.com, sites/articles whose main subject is Project Runway. Ohconfucius 09:23, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• Keep all the contestants currently part of Project Runway 3, even if they have been eliminated. Until the show finishes airing in September it is impossible to guage the impact of their appaerance on the show on their career. Katherine Gerdes, in particular, seems to have a career as a designer independent of this show. Daniel Franco from seasons 2 and 3 obviously also has a career as a designer as does Santino Rice. The fact that he was arrogant is completely irrelevant. Crunch 11:02, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• Psychotically strong keep for Santino Rice I'm so tired of these merged nominations when one subject is clearly more notable than the others. Santino made the top three, had a showing at Fashion Week, and is absolutely a notable designer nowadays. For the love of christ, Santino Rice gets 63,600 Google hits! Here's an MTV video story, here's an article from the Village Voice, there have been countless Defamer articles on him, and if you want tabloids, here's an article from the Philadelphia Daily News. Shall I continue? And seriously, why the hell are Runway contestants being targeted? -- Kicking222 13:44, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• Keep: It is not the least bit obvious what the terms "average notability" or "inherently notable" mean, yet they are used by Ohconfucius to convey some kind of pseudo-scientific aura of justification. Reality shows done well are comedy / dramas. They are crafted to make us interested in the contestants for 15 or 16 weeks. They are in effect mini-soap operas. As such, winning is beside the point to the "notability" of those involved. Read the blogs on the show as people passionately defend the "good guys" or berate the "bad guys". Indeed, given that the producers do not need to worry about keeping fans interested in the same characters for year after year (as is the case in traditional television fare), they are freer to pump up the story lines and the resulting emotions. One can be a snob about all of this and think that notability should be something more than having hundreds of thousands of people wonder whether or not you are going to be eliminated on a TV reality show. But then you would just be a snob.

Jdclevenger 16:36, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• Delete. Not notable. -Kmaguir1 17:11, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• The claim seems to be that unless you have notability outside of a Reality TV series, you are not entitiled to space in Wikipedia (space being such an increadably precious commodity within Wikipedia. Oh wait it isn't, is it?). By this logic, all Wikipedia pages devoted to fictional characters should be marked for deletion. After all, a fictional character's notability is almost by defintion a construct of the fiction in which he or she occurs. For example, Col. Jack O'Neill has a very nice article despite the fact that he is a character on Stargate / SG-1. Presumably, his notabilty is solely a function of the movie and the TV show and all the web references about him will be in the same contexts. Jack O'Neill will never write a book or run for president or do anything else notable, other than be a character of fiction. The contestants on a Reality TV show occupy an interesting niche. There notablity may be nothing more than that given by the show on which they appear. But if being a character on SG-1 is sufficent for notablity for Jack O'Neill, then it strikes me that it is sufficent for Kayne Gillaspie, Keith Michael, Bradley Baumkirchner, and all the rest. Jdclevenger 17:56, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• A follow-up to my note above. One might argue that as main character on a series that has run for 10 years, Jack O'Neill has acheived some kind of notableness outside the context of the show. If so, one would still be hard pressed to justify the pages of Mr. and Mrs. Stoppable or Josh Mankey. These may not ring any bells for those not plugged into day-time Disney fare. The former are the parents of Kim Possible's sidekike Ron Stoppable and the later is Kim's love interest in several episodes. Again, my take is that the characters on Project Runway et.al. are in fact characters in a drama. The standards of notablity for inclusion in Wikipedia should be based on the standards for Television characters. Jdclevenger 18:41, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Why are we limiting ourselves to one season of one show? There's Kwame Jackson and all the other articles in Category:Reality television participants. -Acjelen 19:32, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment It does seem to me that a little bit of an unfair set of criteria in use here. Reality television characters can be notable only for things other than what makes people want to write and read about them? It's a bit like saying that bands are only notable if they have done something notable besides create music. I think the criteria for including reality tv characters should be pretty straightforwardly related to their Ghits and the same criteria that applies to other bios. Ghits for blogs and reviews about a band's latest album or tour aren't discounted immediately are they? Minor reality show characters are rarely mentioned in articles or blogs about the shows and don't have as many Ghits, therefore there's an argument there for not including them. Or a new set of guidelines relating to reality tv should be hammered out. Dina 21:12, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Bad analogy. It's not at all like saying that bands are only notable if they have done something notable besides create music. The nomination is based on the lack of notability outside PR, not outside their field of expertise. One is not the subset of the other. Not all PR contestants were put up for AfD.Ohconfucius 04:02, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment I guess what I'm taking issue with here is the basic assumption that appearing on PR does not make a person notable. What these people are primarily known for is appearing on this show -- why is that rejected out of hand as sufficient notability? Some are more notable than others within that ie. Santino Rice is a more notable Project Runway contestant than Marla Duran, not because of things he did outside the show, but because he did more things on it, and was mentioned in articles and reviews with greater frequency. Why must their notability be dependent only on factors besides what they're actually famous for? And anyway, non-notability is not a grounds for deletion.WP:DP Dina 15:37, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Comment. I'm wondering if it's just that people are surprised, shocked, and even a bit offended, by the idea that a reality show contestant, let alone an aspiring fashion designer, can warrant a Wikipedia article, while skads of other anonymous folks are dismissed as not worthy of such an article because they are "not notable." Look, I'm equally shocked when I see lengthy articles on fictional characters from video games. But apparently these characters are notable in some circles, even though I wouldn't know them if they were sleeping in bed next to me. Maybe we should just accept that Santino Rice, Kayne Gillaspie, Katherine Gerdes et al are as notable to afficianados of reality television or fashion design as (fill in your favorite fictional video game character) are to their followers. Crunch 23:49, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I heard through the grapevine that Santino was offered a spot on "The Surreal Life"

Keep. This is ridiculous. These people are notable now. We can't just say "Who will care in a few years?" because someone will care. As an active member of the Olympics Wikiproject, I can tell you that we have pages created for Olympians that placed from 1st all the way to 8th place in a single event over 100 years ago. Most of these are not Olympic medalists, but they get a WP page because they were notable at the time, and in their field. One of the things that drew me to WP in the first place was that it had obscure information like this, that I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else. This is the sum of human knowledge, and that includes Reality TV, whether you or I like it or not. As for notability on Reality TV, OhConfucius says that the zoo may be notable, but Monkey A and Monkey B are not. This does not come close to applying here. Imagine if millions of people across America were interested in these two monkeys - they knew Monkey A and Monkey B by name, could tell them apart by looking at them, knew their mannerisms, and went to places like WP to learn more. Then we'd have a comparison. tiZom_(2¢) 15:51, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Keep. I completely understand why, in a year or so, we might want to re-evaluate the relevence of these pages. Probably in 5 years they won't all need their own pages. At the moment, however, the show is a not insignificant part of popular culture, and I have trouble beleiving people (especially casual and rerun veiwers of the show) don't come here all the time looking for more information. None of these individual pages are inappropriately long or detailed, and besides, if we eliminated these we'd just end up trying to cram these details into the season 3 page, which is pretty massive as it is.Chunkyrice 13 22:52, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

• Keep. Can't add much to tiZom's comment; we should revisit when the season ends. I do wish this vote hadn't been combined; Bradley alone would get a delete from me. Bradley was non-notable throughout Season 3 and will likely remain so afterwards. Che Fox 06:12, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

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.