Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bill Majors

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 No Consensus. BLACKKITE 00:51, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bill Majors

Bill Majors (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Non-notable missionary. A good bio, but he hasn't done anything unusual or notable that 10,000 other missionaries haven't also done. Also, while he founded International Worship in English, that also doesn't appear a notable org, but that's for another time and place.Mbisanz (talk) 08:02, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Change to Neutral Right now, the only reason I have to support this AfD I created is that I am not certain Honorary Citizenship is notable (since AfD, other facts were added). However, as I don't have the knowledge to ascertain whether or not it is a notable honor, it would be inappropriate to use a hunch as the sole reason to delete.

However, as others in the community that I respect have expressed their opinions, its also probably rude to say that I as nominator trump their will and try and close this AfD myself.

So instead I'm changing my !vote to neutral and have no opinion on the worthiness of this article for inclusion in the encyclopedia. MBisanz ^talk 13:12, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

• Delete Agreed as per nom. docboat (talk) 10:31, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
• Keep the Article My understanding of Wikipedia is that it serves to inform netizens about factual or newsworthy people, places, and things. The problem with Mbisanz's argumentation is that Wikpedia should not set a standard of 'notable' or 'unusual' above any newspaper--for to do so is to limit the total exchange of reported and existent information. For instance, Wikipedia has a reference on aglet. I think most people could care less about the etymology, definition, and allusions of aglet, but for people like me who are interested in all information, great and small (though I, myself alone perhaps, don't grade information) are excited when they punch 'aglet' into Wikipedia and find a relative wealth of information. Therefore, I call not only for the preservation of Bill Majors, but also for the welcome inclusion of any missionary who has caught the attention of any newspaper, and Majors's work has been reported by two capital metropolitan presses, the The JoongAng Daily and The Seoul Times. Bill Majors is a tiny Wikipedia entry because it's supported by only three references, but the references are solid and it should stay. Jim Elliot has a much larger entry because of the greater fame of his story. Bill Majors has a sliver of fame in his corner of the world and he deserves a proportional piece of Wikipedia. As something as tiny and, to many, insignificant as an aglet has an entry, so any person who has been documented by a professional journalist should too. Let's expand Wikipedia by making it a concise cross-reference of media, rather than trying to enforce some nebulous standard of 'unique' or 'notable'. Davidabram (talk) 12:26, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
• Weak Delete per nom, although some more solid references could move me to not care one way or the other. Besides, argument above isn't compelling (though I do appreciate the info on aglet) and the Jim Elliot statement is both waxy and, more to the point, makes exactly the opposite argument the writer is trying to make. It's sort of like saying that Bill Rodgers had a long-distance running article of more import written about him, and I had mention in a couple of articles that I ran cross-country, so I do too. I did, and I don't. Ψν^Psi_nu 13:47, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
• Comment (Baseline Keep): Refer not to waxy but to WP:NOTBIGENOUGH and this particular quote therein: "Those working at newspapers, magazines, journals and other secondary sources have to make sure that a subject is notable before they write a piece on it, because if they do not, no-one will read it, their employer will lose money, and they will get fired. So we can rely on their judgement of ["how notable is notable"] - but we cannot rely on ours." Poseidon or pneumatic or whatever his name is doesn't refute my point but makes it. Why walk this silly tightrope of 'all references are equal but some are more equal than others'? If you want to dig up your cross-country win reported by the Jellystown Gazette and include that ribbon-breaking glory-shot taken by your mom 'go ahead with your bad se'f', as we say back home. My vision of Wikipedia is unlike that of the stiff leather-bound Encyclopædia Britannica I grew up with (and still exists for all those encyclopedia puritans out there): as long as sources are cited, grammatical and objective standards are maintained, and photos are free from copyright infringement, I say let it all ride, from Bill Majors, through Steve Lomasney, to Gerald P. Pulley. Let's allow Wikipedia to reflect the fullness of all documented information rather than making it into some public version of the World Book Encyclopedia. Davidabram (talk) 17:05, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Davidabram, AfD is not about voting. So you don't need to say keep many times. Dekisugi (talk) 17:10, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. Without any reference to inclusionism vs. deletionism, this article -- considered as a stand-alone article -- seems to be of interest to the strictly local area of a single city and thus doesn't seem to me to meet WP:Notable. We already have something that contains endless reams of human knowledge (and opinion), collected and displayed without regard to notability (or accuracy or common sense) -- it's called the Internet. This is an encyclopedia and it's for notable topics. Anyone who wants to try and change the notability policy is welcome to do so -- elsewhere. Accounting4Taste:talk 20:35, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. No sources that reveal any particular notability. I'm afraid Davidabram does not understand Wikipedia's policies on deletion. Rebecca (talk) 22:17, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. The article asserts notability, but more importantly, it is backed up by reliable sources -newspapers. What's the problem here? Davidabram brings up a valid point with the Notbigenough argument, and I will also add, from the same guideline:

"Some subjects' notability may be limited to a particular country, region, or culture. However, arguments that state that because a subject is unknown or not well known among English readers it should not have an article encourage a systemic bias on Wikipedia. To avoid this systemic bias, Wikipedia should include all notable topics, even if the subject is not notable within the English speaking population or within more populous or Internet-connected nations. Likewise, arguments that state that because a subject is lesser known or even completely unknown outside a given locality does not mean the subject is not notable"

. (emphasis mine) WP:IKNOWIT. Keeper | 76 15:23, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment (Keep With New References) : I've been making two arguments here, basically, 1) that Bill Majors is a notable missionary and worthy of a Wikipedia article, and that 2) what makes any person notable is coverage by a media outlet. #2 we can debate 'until the cows come home' (as my mom says--and probably even while there at home), but I want to, once and for all, lay #1 to rest--in light of the two new references that I have added to Bill Majors, his Honorary Citizenship of Seoul, granted to only 437 people since 1972 (not 10,000 as Mbisanz so unfairly quipped in his deletion nomination), and his serving as a source for the Wall Street Journal. I don't know about the other posters here, but I've never heard the sound of the Wall Street Journal calling for comment. Therefore, since Keeper76 (a name that I hope does not denote his willingness to arbitrarily keep any proposed Wikipedia article--but rather his dedication to chime in when articles meet his high Journeyman Editor standards) voted to keep Bill Majors even BEFORE I added the two new references, that, AFTERWARDS, we can now unanimously agree to remove the undeserved AfD from Bill Majors. Davidabram (talk) 04:10, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
• Keep- He is a notable figure affiliated to one of the biggest churches in South Korea. He even received a Honorary Citizenship of Seoul for his achievement in South Korea. Does notability always have to be associated with English speaking world? This nomination is just absurd. --Appletrees (talk) 17:30, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Being "associated" with something notable, doesn't confer notability. And I've been working with the Korea Wikiproject to find out how notable "Honorary Citizenship of Seoul" is. My first thought would be that its akin to the "keys of a city" for an American city, but I could be wrong and am looking into it. MBisanz ^Talk 14:23, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

• Delete- I have checked through the linked website, and have found the following post:

December 29, 2007 - David Milanaik posted the articles for the International Worship in English and also another article describing Bill Majors. Thanks David for putting IWE on the map. >Have you ever tried to find IWE on wikipedia? > >I tried to write an article and wikipedia did not allow me as the founder to write about myself. (I guess that is why) > >I need somebody who can write a short article about IWE and let people know that there is an International Worship in English in Seoul at Youngnak Church. > >It would be great to be found be people through the free encyclopedia on the internet. > >Anybody willing to give it a try? > >Cool.... > >PB > >ideas: > >Article for IWE > >The International Worship in English (IWE is pronounced "I" "WE") is a community of faith in Seoul, South Korea. Bill Majors (now the head pastor) worked in Youngnak Presbyterian Church (2-69 Jeodong, Chungku Seoul 100-032, South Korea) as a simultaneous translator in the 9:30 AM and 11:30 AM Korean worship services from 1988 until 1993. The international people who visited did not join the church, but just enjoyed attending the church to experience a "big worship" in Korea. The Senior Pastor of Youngnak 1987-1997 (Rev Lim, Young Soo) encouraged Bill Majors to return to America to attend seminary. After seminary Pastor Bill returned to Korea with a vision to start an International Worship in English (www.myiwe.com). Youngnak's session approved the first International Worship in English on Easter of 1998. Today the International Worship in English has become a growing ministry (English worship services 10 AM & 3 PM on Sunday and also 8 PM on Wednesday) in the international community of Seoul. Through the website (www.myiwe.com) you can find worship videos, pictures and location map (downtown near Myoung-dong). >

http://myiwe.com/bbs/view.php?id=board&no=1120

This article, and the speedily deleted article International Worship in English falls under WP:COI, even before we begin to consider its merits. Wikijgraft (talk) 14:41, 2 January 2008 (UTC) note: this is the only contribution so far from user "Wikijgraft" as long as we're throwing out COI concerns. When I was new, I didn't know what COI was, or db-bio for that matter. Hmm. Keeper | 76 15:06, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Eh, we do say you can edit your own biography, just to be careful when doing it. if he's notable he gets an article, if he's not, he doesn't, the COI issues probably are better handled at WP:COIN as an editing or mass-add issue. MBisanz ^talk 15:17, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree. The COI issue, although obvious here, does not 'non-notable' make. (see Gerald P. Pulley - a COI article, nominated by Mbisanz, then correctly withdrawn after sources were appropriately added (and I "voted" delete there :-)) . At issue here is the article's subject. This particular subject, Bill Majors, has an article with references from Seoul Times, JoongAngDaily and the Wall Street Journal. The JoongAngDaily article has a picture of Mr. Majors in the lead section. I've never heard of Bill Majors. I've never heard of IWE, as I'm guessing the vast majority of Wikipedians would also admit to. But I have never heard of 99% of the articles that are rightfully here. The key is verifiability through reliable resources. This article fits the bill (and I usually lean towards deletionism, check my contribs if you don't believe me.) I recommend a nominator withdrawal and a review of the speedy deletion of the parent organization IWE. Keeper | 76 15:46, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Well I don't think I'm the one who speedy'd it, so that probably WP:DRV, There is still another day or two with this AfD and I'd like to get the notability of the honorary citizenship worked out, as that is the deciding factor for me. MBisanz ^talk 15:56, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comment I've been reading Wikipedia articles for a few years now and I promote them to students as a springboard for citable information. I tell my students never to site Wikipedia as it's not a source in and of itself but a collection of sources. I always thought that Wikipedia was pretty cool until I started to see, just last week, what a bunch of stuffed-shirt simpletons are responsible for making it tick--or not tick as the case seems to be. What a Wizard of Oz moment! The ideals of Wikipedia are sound: to create "a neutral, verifiable encyclopedia free from original research, and the aims of an individual editor".[1] Unfortunately, the ideals of Wikipedia have fallen into the hands of some ridiculous information police, who feel it's their job to decide the very quality of facts, because the game of simply certifying veracity is too easy. As Keeper76 pointed out above, I used newspapers to back up my articles, and, like any journalist, I can write objectively when my content calls for it. Does anyone have a problem with Kyung-Chik Han? I wrote that today. Well, gee, the Templeton Prize, I never heard of that, even though Wikipedia says it's worth more than the Nobel Prize--and Mother Teresa and Billy Graham are notable, but maybe Kyung-Chik Han is just "associated" with their notability. What is that supposed to mean, "associated with notability"? That notable people may be made Honorary Citizens of Seoul but being made an Honorary Citizen of Seoul does not make one notable? You'd think someone who has to point out the twenty-five law schools that he's been accepted to on one of his user (or is that 'loser'?) pages might have sharper powers of reasoning. Well, I, for one, am not beguiled by such ethos. I thought Wikipedia was Infopedia, but it's really just Famouspedia. It's impossible to learn anything new from it because before you have a chance to find a cool fact or person that fact or person has been consumed by a school of sharks. Davidabram (talk) 16:20, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comment (Keep with Total Project Complete) Basically, Kyung-Chik Han was awarded the 1992 Templeton Prize for founding Young Nak Presbyterian Church. And Bill Majors, an American missionary to Seoul, was made an Honorary Citizen of Seoul for creating an English ministry, International Worship in English, at Young Nak Presbyterian Church, an effort that was the final fruit of Han's achievement. We have two notable men, two notable accomplishments, and one vision. Han was born in Korea and studied in the US and Korea. Majors was born in the US and studied in the US and Korea. Both men worked together to shape a notable two-pronged organization that bridges countries and continents. Over the last ten days, I've tried to make the firm beginnings of four articles that tell this entire story, complete with all the necessary sources that prove both accuracy and notability. I apologize if I've been short or gruff with anyone, but I get upset when people seem to doubt my respect for the integrity of Wikipedia; I've tried my best to make articles that meet its ideals of accurate and important information. Davidabram (talk) 09:44, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Closing Admin please note this is a duplicate vote see above. This guy is not helping his case even though I agree with a lot of his points.--BozMo talk 19:10, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

I corrected the duplicated signs of Davidabram because of the confusion. --Appletrees (talk) 19:36, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

• Keep At least two solid, reliable, independent references giving significant coverage to the subject are shown in the article, therefore it meets WP:N. And besides that, he seems to be a nice guy, and that's just gotta count for something.Noroton (talk) 17:27, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. Despite the style issues with the newbie author as far as I can see this guy has enough notability. --BozMo talk 21:47, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
• Weak delete. This article doesn't yet make an adequate case for the notability of the subject, in my view. I am not too distressed if it is kept, but it seems unable to express what is interesting or significant about the man. He seems to have won some awards, but the article doesn't tell us what work he did to deserve the awards. Perhaps there are some additional sources to be found somewhere. The article also contains some ridiculous wikilinks to generally-understood English words such as article and daughter, that I'm sure an editor could quickly fix. The first entry under 'Bibliography' is a forum posting that I'm sure is not acceptable under WP:RS. EdJohnston (talk) 22:23, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

If the words are so generally understood, there's no reason for them to be in Wikipedia at all. Wikipedia is about exploration that leads to knowledge expansion. A fool says, 'Duh! I know what daughter means.' A scholar reads the article and follows all the links therein, internal and external, and reads and reads until he gets tired and it's time for lunch. I'm not a scholar. I'm a fool. But I'm trying to use Wikipedia to change, and that means following all links as a reader, and including all links as an editor. At daughter you may find a link to Juan de Flandes. And article has seventeen references and three external links. Even something as seemingly obvious and petty as the color orange (which is just an example and not in Bill Majors) has a chapter on the color in culture with eighteen examples in it--and another chapter just on different shades of orange that's prefaced by a link to variations of orange. As for the first entry in the bibliography, I didn't hyperlink the original article because it's a dead link. So I included a link to the only copy of the article that I could find on the Internet. Of course, one might argue that it may be a fake article. But a scholar might want to access to it, so I put it there. I guess you could stick it in 'external links' but it's a newspaper article that supports the content so it belongs in the bibliography with a Caveat lector that it's archived. If you want to edit it further to read 'Archived at site external to original' that's fine by me. Davidabram (talk) 01:24, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Comment. Your view seems to differ from existing policy. See WP:OVERLINK, which provides:

A high density of links can draw attention away from the high-value links that readers would benefit from following. (Example: Lucy went to the store.) Redundant links clutter up the page and make future maintenance harder. A link is analogous to a cross-reference in a print medium. Imagine if every second word in an encyclopedia article were followed by "(see:)". The links should not be so numerous as to make the article harder to read.

This will be a more effective article (and will be more helpful to the reader) if it only uses links relevant to the context, such as Templeton Prize or Yonsei University. Regarding my comment about a 'forum posting,' I think you are correct, in that the forum is only a 'convenience link' in this situation. The real reference is the newspaper article, which is not required to be online. EdJohnston (talk) 02:50, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

• "Imagine if every second word in an encyclopedia article were followed by "(see:)"". I'm imagining that, okay, but I don't see how Wikipedia is any way analogous to a print medium in this case. Even if Wikipedia sentences are entirely composed of linked words the sentences are just blue, and no harder to read. And you can click on any links you want and the blue becomes purple. Then if you return to the page you can separate the links you've seen from the ones you have not by purple and blue. With the 'Lucy went to the store' example I can tell there are different links there by moving my mouse arrow over the words. The existence of the word 'to' in the example caused me to click on it. I don't know if would have ever put to into the 'search' box and hit 'go'. But by following 'to' I found that it may be an abbreviation for thermal oxidizer which I just learned "is a process unit for air pollution control". I see your point of appealing the Wiki rules, but do you see mine of appealing to a separate reason and logic? The main problem I see with Wikipedia editing is that the construction method is outmoded. The more links and references you have, the more clutter you need. You should be able to write with ease with some sort of Word processing interface--formatting text and adding links with left-click selection and right-click and drop down menu choices--not all these brackets, asterisks, colons and whatnot. Davidabram (talk) 12:05, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Once again, you are disagreeing with the current Wikipedia guideline. If you think this is important, you should be endeavoring to get the relevant policy changed, and not using an AfD discussion as a soapbox. You should also try to comment more briefly. It's partly my fault for bringing up this point. EdJohnston (talk) 19:01, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Point me to a better box and I'll lather it up. Is this brief enough? (Though next time I think I'll go for a novella). Davidabram (talk) 00:08, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. [2] demonstrats notability. Rewrite using secondary sources. The current two reference don't contains the subject's name! Advise the author to base contributions on verifiable sources explicitly, and avoid contributing from personal knowledge. We don't delete newcomer's articles because they haven't got the approved style. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:37, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
  • I am assuming that the author will provide further references to demonstrate notability. They may be in Korean. If not, Merge and redirect to Young Nak Presbyterian Church, as per Dougie WII below is acceptable. If not, in preference to deletion, Usefy for User:Davidabram in expectation of better sources and a rewrite. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:00, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

• Delete, as one article and honorary citizenship do not make a person notable. Bearian (talk) 15:31, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect to Young Nak Presbyterian Church. The church is notable, but I don't think three separate articles are needed. -- Dougie WII (talk) 20:14, 7 January 2008 (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.