Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James W. Walter (3rd nomination)

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 to delete, especially after discounting the one-liner WP:ATA opinions either way, so default to keep. Sandstein 10:15, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] James W. Walter

James W. Walter (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

First Deletion Reason: Not a single Google News hit, except to a PR release, which is just a ref to his name, but says nothing about him. Fails Wikipedia:Notability (people). Person was briefly a celeb for offering a 9/11 conspiracy theory reward, and to the extent that he was a recognizable public figure, that star has set. This article is part of a walled garden of 9/11 conspiracy theory articles. Serves as Wikipedia:Vanispamcruftisement for the 9/11 conspiracy "movement".  MortonDevonshire  Yo  · 05:28, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

• Delete as conspiracy cruft. Pablo Talk | Contributions 05:39, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

• Comment I think that Bigtimepiece is correct. While Walter is certainly not notable enough to have his own article, I think there is potential to merge pieces of this article into the 9/11 Truth article. Pablo Talk | Contributions 10:08, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

• Delete Fails notability guideline. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 06:20, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete and probably merge some content into the 9/11 Truth Movement (or maybe 9/11 Conspiracy Theories) article. Walter himself does not seem notable enough, he got some mainstream coverage back in 2004, but this seems to have been for his campaign, which itself does have some notability. I don't know much about the 9/11 articles, but I think some info from this article with respect to his ad campaign should be dumped into one of them (2 or 3 sentences). Spending nearly 4 million on advertisements questioning the "official" 9/11 story is interesting, and Walter should be discussed in some article for that action.--Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 07:11, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Conspiracy theories-related deletions. -- John Vandenberg 09:22, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete - another coat-hanger for presentation of conspiracy theories; lacks independent reliable sources. Any significant material would be better presented at 9/11 Truth Movement or 9/11 Conspiracy Theories, per Bigtimepeace above. Tom Harrison ^Talk 13:03, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

  The article has sources from the following: Reuters, New York Times, St. Petersburg Times, Der Spiegel, ABC News, RAI. Are these not independent reliable sources? --SevenOfDiamonds 18:21, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

• Delete good to see that the cabal is still on the watch for cruft. GabrielF 14:38, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per nominator. Bart133 ^{(t) (c)} 17:29, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
• Keep!. The nominator's Google News search is a flawed metric, since Google News only turns up very recent stories. Many subjects on Wikipedia would flunk that test. A more valid search would be the Google News Archive,[1] which returns over 100 hits for that search. Examining them will show that many of them relate to his father, Walter Sr., and many are press releases. But that search will also leave out many relevant articles, because Walter is usually called "Jimmy," and elsewhere appears without his middle initial. Even after slogging through the dross, there are reliable sources not reflected in the current article. For instance, it doesn't mention his double-night segments on Anderson Cooper 360, debating Gerald Posner.[2] [3] There's also a Creative Loafing article[4] that provides enough detail to fill out his biography beyond "coatrack" status. It also makes it clear that his role as sugar daddy to the 9//11 Truth Movement goes beyond running ads. He actually funded and put together many of their symposiums. He also produced a documentary, Confronting the Evidence, and distributed 300,000 free copies, including mailing 17,000 copies to every household in Tony Blair's Sedgefield home district.[5] There are foreign-language articles, illustrating the international scope of his activities. While not avoiding self-publicity, he's apparently content to let the focus be on the cause, making his importance in the 9/11 movement greater than it seems from the current article. Frankly, I consider this AfD to be anti-conspiracy WP:IDONTLIKEIT dressed up in non-notability concerns. Even the nominator admits he was "briefly a celeb," While I want conspiracy theories presented in an NPOV way, I do not share this desire to purge all traces of their existence from Wikipedia. In its own way, I regard it as a form of POV-pushing just as much as the efforts of the believers to dominate legitimate articles with their theories. --Groggy Dice T | C 23:22, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
• Keep for regularly appearing in media, resulting in a number of focus pieces on him and his endeavours. The 9/11 component of this bio is balanced. John Vandenberg 00:20, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete as nominated. The problem is that he is not widely recognized in that his coverage/exposure (both modern day and historical) is trivial. Since his coverage in mainstream media is minimal at best (most of the references provided are "fancruft" sources), any notable fact about him should be merged into 9/11 conspiracy theories and/or 9/11 Truth Movement article where appropriate. JungleCat Shiny!/Oohhh! 02:53, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. Lexis Nexis Academic full text search for 10 years of general news shows only a handful of items, (about 3 out of 21 articles and the other 18 are mostly obits or other items not related to this man) that actual refer to this James W. Walter. They all relate to his publicity stunt advertisement. The Tampa Tribune even goes so far as to end its article about the ad entitled The Fantasy Of A 9/11 Coverup (November 12, 2004) saying, "Let's be clear on one thing: James Walter is from Santa Barbara, Calif., not Tampa." Wikipedia need not bother with an article for a person with so few Lexis items who has no notability beyond a single publicity stunt. --Dual Freq 03:02, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Query - did you just search for James W. Walter, or does that include results for Jimmy Walter and James Walter? --Groggy Dice T | C 19:36, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

• Delete Wikipedia:Vanispamcruftisement per nom. --Tbeatty 06:16, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete Torturous Devastating Cudgel 01:22, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Brimba 03:43, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. I guess I have to rely on the admin actually believing that this is not a vote, and a good argument beats any number of people voting in lockstep. James Walter has non-trivial articles devoted to him, and yes, his ad campaign in The New York Times, Reuters, ABC News, and Der Spiegel. These were over a month and a half, so they were independent articles, though they were about the same campaign. The St Petersburg Times article was about a completely different event, an ad campaign against the Iraq War. The CNN debate would be yet another event. These all clearly make him meet Wikipedia:Notability, and that should be sufficient to keep, per our guideline. The deletion reasons, on the other hand are just silly. "Not a single Google News hit" doesn't appear anywhere in any of our guidelines or policies as a deletion reason. There isn't a single Google News hit for Audrey Landers either,[6] just to pick another article I mostly wrote; are we going to delete her article? The "walled garden" of "9/11 conspiracy movement" accusations are, besides being silly, untrue -- I was the main writer of this article, and you can check that in so far as I have an area of focus it is quite different. :-) --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 08:56, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Comment: Well, that's certainly not what our policy says. See WP:BLP#Articles_about_living_people_notable_only_for_one_event, where it says:

at WP:BLP1E.  MortonDevonshire  Yo  · 20:31, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

• Right, that's why I went on so much about those multiple and different events there, in that comment you're responding to. Since he mounts multiple campaigns, it should be clear that each individual campaign isn't a "larger subject".--AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 20:47, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

• Those were all ad campaigns, and not notable by themselves. Stringing them together does not make the buyer of the ads notable.  MortonDevonshire  Yo  · 20:51, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

• Right again. The thing that makes the buyer of the ads notable is "The person has been the subject of multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the subject." That's called the primary notability criterion, among other places in Wikipedia:Notability (people). In other words it's the coverage by ABC, and Reuters, and New York Times, and Der Spiegel, and CNN, and the St. Petersburg Times that shows he's notable.--AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 21:10, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Those mentions were all done in the context of a particular event: buying ads (WP:BLP1E). The coverage was about the ad-buying, otherwise, Walter is not known in the press.  MortonDevonshire  Yo  · 21:16, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

• Different events. The Italian article is about a television documentary he produced. The New York Times article is about a series of ads; nothing about a reward or a documentary. The Reuters Australia article is about the reward he's offering. The St Petersburg Times article is the most biographical one; it's primarily about him, but it doesn't even mention 9/11, or the ads - it predates the ads you're talking about, it mentions a completely different ad about Colin Powell and the Iraq war. The two CNN transcripts are about a separate event in themselves, they're not about the ads, they're separate national appearances stating his views. It's a political campaign, which is not one event. --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 21:39, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. The subject of multiple news articles in mainstream sources, including significant profiles. Gamaliel (Orwellian Cyber hell master) 20:40, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
• Keep per AnonEMouse.  ALKIVAR™ ☢ 05:17, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete not notable enough and crufty.--MONGO 09:49, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete Despite the sources provided by AnonEMouse, I still don't think there are enough to consider Walter notable enough and make a decent biographical article about him. --Aude (talk) 10:48, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
• Keep Per Groggy Dice. It seems the nominator just failed to do proper searches to verify, which is obviously not their fault. What I see in the nomination is faulty search terms that lead to their misunderstanding of the subject and its notability. I think this article should be expanded to include the great research Groggy Dice was able to come up with and flesh out the article more on the located biography. I had not even noticed the previous AfD's which seem to contain much of the same faces here again voting for deletion, this is apparently the nominators second attempt at deletion. Oddly after reading through it further, to address the no reliable sources claims. The article has sources from the following: Reuters, New York Times, St. Petersburg Times, Der Spiegel, ABC News, RAI. These also do not seem to be a "walled garden" of conspiracy "cruft" --SevenOfDiamonds 14:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Cruftilicious. - Crockspot 17:04, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. This definitely meets the notability guideline not to mention our attribution policies as well. Burntsauce 17:44, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
• Comment - here is another independent and a famous and popular, if not particularly respected, source, Maxim magazine, March 2006, calling him "the Truth Movement’s most prominent promoter", and devotes a 7 paragraph section to him. Notice he is still called that 2 years after the earlier articles, proving that it's not a "15 minutes of fame" case. --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 20:24, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Here is yet another, from Australia, respected newspaper, Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 21, 2005, a rather large piece, devoted to him as much or more than his ads. " ... He inherited a fortune from his father, a successful builder, and intends to spend it on uncovering the truth, as he sees it. So far he has spent more than $US5 million - three-quarters of his net worth. Why is he spending his money on this? "I'm 58 years old, I have no kids, no wife, no family." He is now living in Austria, where he moved after his car was attacked. ... " Remember, the New York Times article was on November 8, 2004, over a year before that. So he's getting continued coverage in multiple continents, over multiple years. Pretty clear evidence of notability. --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 20:43, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
• Keep, notability is established. Everyking 02:30, 21 July 2007 (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.