Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sally Morningstar

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 (default keep). The onus is on those making the recommendation to delete an article, to demonstrate that it merits deletion. In this case, some of the deletion arguments presented were that the books written by this author were self-published; but this has been demonstrated to not be the case. Other statements in favor of delete include various descriptions of how specific websearches fail to produce sources that should exist for notable subjects. However, such websearches are not the sole arbiter of notability, and have routinely been shown to be a poor method of determining notability in many cases. There appears to be some misunderstanding of both the Wicca religion and Witches, which is understandable due to the high degree of fictional material on these subjects. All of that aside, there was no clear consensus to delete. The deletion policy directs that when a clear consensus to delete is not achieved, and is unlikley to be achieved through extended discussion, to keep the article. Jerry talk ¤ count/logs 16:25, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sally Morningstar

Sally Morningstar (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) (delete) – (View log)

Despite the large number of books to her credit, I can't find significant coverage of her. A Google News search came up with 17 hits but almost all were for other people. She seems to be British and most are obit survivor in Rye, New York, USA. Looking at the WP:BIO guidelines pertaining to authors WP:BIO#Creative professionals, she doesn't appear to meet the standards for inclusion. The article has been tagged for citations since Dec 2007 and I suspect this is because there are none to be found. Pigman☿ 03:31, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

• Delete per nom, nn.  Atyndall93 | talk  03:38, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
• Keep: good article but needs better, format. Dwilso 04:22, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

• Comment: More to the point, it needs sources beyond her exceptionally commercial personal website. Pigman☿ 04:43, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

• Delete, many books but they all appear to be self-published or from small, non notable presses, and no other apparent assertion of notability. KleenupKrew (talk) 09:05, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. -- BelovedFreak 15:59, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. None of her books is from a notable press, and self-published people don't belong on Wikipedia. She completely fails WP:BK. Qworty (talk) 17:44, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep First, an author doesn't have to be in the news to be notable. Some authors neither seek the limelight, nor are in fields that are often featured in the newspapers, but are notable nonetheless. Second, I see no reason to believe that any of the books are self-published. The presses she has been published by are notable ones, especially in her field. For example:

Hay House is one of the fastest-growing self-help and transformational publishers in the world, selling our products to more than 35 countries around the world. They currently publish approximately 300 books and 350 audio programs by more than 130 authors, and employ a full-time staff of 100-plus. Hay House is a medium-sized publishing house bringing in big-name authors, including Diane Ladd, Ben Stein, Suze Orman, Carnie Wilson, Sylvia Browne, Montel Williams, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Iyanla Vanzant, John Edward, Marianne Williamson, Barbara De Angelis, Tavis Smiley, Jim Brickman, Stedman Graham and Phil McGraw. New Beginnings Press, Princess Books, and Smiley Books are imprints of Hay House. Hay House is located in Carlsbad, California, with international divisions in Australia, the United Kingdom, India, and South Africa. Hay House launched its own radio station in early 2005. HayHouseRadio.com®—Radio for your Soul™—is broadcast worldwide via the Internet.[1]

Anness Publishing was founded in 1988 and is now the largest independent book publisher in the UK. In their first 19 years they have sold in excess of 120,000,000 books. Each year they produce around 300 new titles on subjects ranging from cooking and crafts to gardening, new age, reference, hobbies and transport plus a lively and successful list of pre-school activity and home study reference books for children. LORENZ BOOKS is their trade sales imprint for new hardback titles, and is celebrating its 14th year in 2007. SOUTHWATER is their trade paperback imprint, which consists of over 700 backlist books and a new programme of 150 titles each year. HERMES HOUSE & PEONY PRESS are their imprints for non-trade sales, promotional sales and customized publishing for major customers.[2]

Piatkus Books are an independent publishing company that has been established for over 25 years. They are a general publisher specializing in the areas of Health, MBS, Biography, Business, History and Womens Fiction and Romance. Piatkus Books has turnover of approximately £10 million and it employs 28 people. It specializes in popular fiction and practical non-fiction. Its authors include the internationally bestselling novelist Nora Roberts, who also writes as J D Robb, and such distinguished and successful non-fiction writers as Patrick Holford, author of important books on health and nutrition, including The New Optimum Nutrition Bible; David Allen, business guru and bestselling author of Getting Things Done; Jon Kabat-Zinn, world-renowned author of Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are; Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, author of Women Who Think Too Much; and Sylvia Browne and Brian L Weiss, whose spiritual books have delighted millions of readers.

News Release: Ursula Mackenzie, CEO and Publisher of Little, Brown, is delighted to announce that Piatkus Books will join Little, Brown and Company Book Group with immediate effect. This follows the signing and completion of an agreement between Judy Piatkus and Little, Brown and Company Book Group on 20 July 2007. Piatkus Books will become an independent imprint within Little, Brown Book Group, thus strengthening Little, Brown Book Group’s position in consumer publishing in the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and its other markets.[3]

Rosencomet (talk) 17:50, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Comment: A news search such as the one I referenced at the top in my nom doesn't just find news stories, it also finds book reviews, calendar listings and minor mentions. I believe non-appearance in such a search is one indicator of notability. Pigman☿ 18:48, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Comment - I don't believe any pagan publications, major or minor, are currently being indexed by Google News search. If publications in the author's field aren't being indexed, then it would seem to be an unfair way to evaluate such an author, leading to an imbalanced representation of pagan authors on Wikipedia relative to religions or spiritual traditions which have more representation in such a search. Valtyr (talk) 05:01, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I certainly don't believe the search I did is the only indicator of notability, just that it is one indicator. Since her (unreferenced) article says "She has appeared on numerous television programs and writes for magazines, newspapers, and periodicals on witchcraft, healing and natural magic," I would expect her name to show up somewhere in that search. Perhaps an interview. If we can't find WP:V and WP:RS to support the info in the article, I find it difficult to accept she passes WP:BIO by Wikipedia standards. I'm certainly sympathetic to the view that Pagan magazines are underrepresented in such searches; I've published or helped publish a handful of Pagan zines myself, some fairly well known in the Pagan community. But we still have to evaluate here by Wikipedia's standards. I've looked for sources as have others in this AfD and come up empty. Pigman☿ 05:33, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

• Keep and expand. Claim that books are self-published appears to be in error. Valtyr (talk) 04:57, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
• Comment. It's very frustrating trying to find sources for this article. I've searched extensively on Yahoo and Google and GoogleNews and I cannot find any evidence of this woman's notability. Neither does the list of publishers given above check out for notability--one of them is so non-notable, in fact, that the website is down, while another is so non-notable that a website is merely promised for the future. About the most we can say is that a human being named "Sally Morningstar" exists and that some of the books exist, and that she claims to be a witch--but as we all know, witches do not exist, and something that does not exist of course cannot be notable. Unfortunately, the mere fact that this person and some of the books exist is not enough to confer notability. Existence is not the same thing as notability, not by a longshot. There is no evidence or claim out there that she is notable among the community of "witches"--a category of person that does not exist to begin with. Please see What Wikipedia Is Not [4], which clearly states that merely being true, or even verifiable, does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia. It is apparently true that a "Sally Morningstar" exists, but it has not been shown that she is notable, or even that she is considered notable by the other "witches." For all we know, the improbable name "Sally Morningstar" may just be a pseudonym anyway, but even that much is impossible to determine through WP:RS. Qworty (talk) 14:21, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

• Comment I find the statements "but as we all know, witches do not exist, and something that does not exist of course cannot be notable" and "the community of "witches"--a category of person that does not exist to begin with" to be offensive in the extreme, and wholly uninformed. Sally Morningstar identifies herself as a Wiccan, a religion whose members call themselves witches, and a religion that is recognized by the United States government both in its IRS classifications for it's churches and in the Chaplain's Manual for their armed forces. A legal case was just won to allow pentagrams on the graves of Wiccan soldiers in military cemetaries. Please don't perpetuate prejudice against members of this religion. And if "Sally Morningstar" is a pen name, which you would have to provide a source for, so is Mark Twain. As for the notability of the presses, they speak for themselves. If you happened to click onto a website that was down at the time, plenty of notable companies and organizations (including Wikipedia) have had their website go down at one time or another, or replaced by a different website. The existence of the presses and the information about them can be easily established. If you are talking about Piatkus Books, their website is down temporarily while they are merging with Little Brown and Company, a VERY notable press, as you would see if you actually read the provided information. Rosencomet (talk) 19:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I consider these statements from the Stregheria talk page offensive and uncivil as well[5], and I think they should be taken into consideration when weighing his vote on any article about a Wiccan individual, especially the following:

"but the facts are indeed these:

• 1) People who promote "witchcraft" are either charlatans or severely mentally ill

• 2) A good number of these Strega folks are Satan worshippers, for whatever that's worth

• 3) The rest of them are a bunch of New Agers who have gone way, way, way over the deep end, spending too much time sucking on water pipes in Santa Cruz and imagining that their deceased Italian forebears are going to drop down out of the sky (or rise up out of Hell) with advice on imagined medical problems, real financial problems, horrible self-created relationship problems, etc.

Now, mind you, I am interested in improving the article, not in starting a flame war with a bunch of witches who think they can put a hex on me. I am not afraid of witches. They do not exist. Lucifer does not exist either, but if a few Italian-American New Agers on the West Coast want to worship Him in order to get their old boyfriends back, so be it."

And this choice bit:

"If Wikipedia can offer a Holocaust Denial article that lets everybody know a certain group is seriously looped, then certainly it can do so about a pack of aging, overweight, chanting devil worshippers belly-dancing around the redwood trees." Rosencomet (talk) 20:17, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

• Comment. If this woman were truly a witch--an assertion I don't believe for one minute--then she would simply be able to close her eyes and twitch her nose and magically create all of the missing WP:RS that would establish her notability. Those WP:RS simply do not exist. Even if witches existed, and even if the necessary WP:RS existed for this particular woman, the burden would still be on the article's defenders to demonstrate that she is a notable witch among all of the witches in the world. None of this has taken place for this article. Yeah, Baptists exist, but an article about a run-of-the-mill Baptist minister would not only be deleted, but speedied. So this has nothing at all to do with "religious prejudice" of any kind, and I very strongly encourage you to strike out your WP:NPA against me above. You can't just go around Wikipedia calling people bigots. Remember: Even if witches existed and she was one, she would still have to be a notable one to merit an article--say, the president of a highly influential coven of witches. But this is a silly argument to begin with because witches don't exist except in works of fiction. Qworty (talk) 20:22, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

• Comment I'm afraid you simply don't know the definition of the word witch. You're describing the super-powered characters from the fictional TV show "Bewitched", not the kind of witch Sally Morningstar is. Read up on Wicca and related topics. To use your example, Baptists would be suspect if they can't close their eyes and pray for whatever they need and have it miraculously appear. There was no personal attack: I did not use either the phrase "religious prejudice" or the word "bigot", nor did I characterize you in any way. I simply asked that you not perpetuate prejudice, a word with a specific definition, and by claiming Ms Morningstar can't be a witch because she hasn't magically created the material you think is required here shows that you not only have pre-judged her according to false definitions of what witches do, but believe with no support that she even knows about this article and has something to do with its contributors. You, on the other hand, have characterized a group of people as non-existent, and used the following terms to describe them: 1. "a pack of aging, overweight, chanting devil worshippers belly-dancing around the redwood trees", and as 2. "charlatans or severely mentally ill", and 3. "a bunch of New Agers who have gone way, way, way over the deep end, spending too much time sucking on water pipes in Santa Cruz". Witches certainly exist, and this is verified in respected sources ranging from the historical to the anthropological to the biblical; there are hundreds of thousands in Europe and the Americas (you can easily talk to many of them online or otherwise) - even though you may doubt their ability to accomplish that which they claim they can. Also, to use your example, a Baptist minister with 15 books published on subjects about his religion by non-vanity presses is plenty notable enough for a Wikipedia article in my opinion, and there are a lot more of those than witches with 15 published books. I don't know that Morningstar is a "notable witch", but she's a notable author of books on witchcraft, magic and related subjects (something you can be even if there WERE no witches, just like a notable author on Sherlock Holmes or mythological creatures). It would be ridiculous to create a new standard that authors of 15 books must have been published by more notable presses than Hay House, Anness Publishing, and Piatkus Books (now a division of Little, Brown & Company) to be considered notable.Rosencomet (talk) 21:06, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) You can try to spin it anyway you like. The fact remains that Sally Morningstar has no notability whatsoever as a witch. If she did, don't you think there would have been at least one news story about her as a notable witch since the beginning of time? And yet the GoogleNews Archive throws up exactly ZERO hits since the beginning of time: [6]. If she was a notable writer, don't you think there would have been at least one notable, verifiable news story about this writer since the beginning of time? And yet the GoogleNews Archive throws up exactly ZERO hits for her as a writer: [7]. You can scream that I'm "prejudiced" till you're purple in the face, but the fact remains that by every guideline regarding WP:RS and WP:BIO, this woman is nothing but a complete nobody. I understand that you appear to respect her personally, in terms of her unestablishable notability as a "witch" and a "writer," but Wikipedia is about following guidelines, not injecting personal views. The article should be deleted. Qworty (talk) 21:19, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. The subject appears to be a low-grade-notable author of new-agey nonsense, with several books published by notable publishing houses. That ought to be enough to establish notability for Wikipedia purposes, since the wretched quality of a writer's work is not enough to offset notability. Google News is simply unreliable for determining whether a writer is notable, since it covers only a tiny fraction of print sources for news and reviews. For example, Google News denies the existence of major, clearly notable genre authors like Gordon R. Dickson [8] and Fletcher Pratt [9] and Lucius Shepard [10] Minos P. Dautrieve (talk) 15:48, 26 April 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.