The page Richmond Derby Demons has been speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appeared to be blatant advertising which only promotes a company, product, group or service and which is unlikely to be suitable for an article (or at best would need a fundamentally rewrite). Please read the general criteria for speedy deletion, particularly item 11, as well as the guidelines on spam. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. NawlinWiki (talk) 05:02, 11 November 2010 (UTC)Reply


Furious i have no idea how to contact the person who deleted our sports teams page while i was mid way through editing it. please contact me.

Recently deleted article

edit

User:NawlinWiki deleted it the first time. I deleted it just now. It appears from the tone and style of the writing that you have a fundemental misunderstanding of what Wikipedia is and how it works. That's OK, you appear to be new here, and new visitors to a place cannot be expected to know or understand how it works. I also read your help desk post regarding this issue. Regarding what Wikipedia is, it is an encyclopedia which is built on certain fundemental principles. Among these are:

  • Verifiability: Wikipedia articles must contain content which is trustworthy insofar as it can be sourced to reliable, independent works. See WP:CITE and WP:RS for a bit more as well.
  • Wikipedia articles must be about notable subjects. Notability is not taken at the word of the editor who created the article, it must be proven, see the point immediately before this. The standard for notability at Wikipedia is: People who are independent of the subject have written extensively about it in reliable sources.
  • Wikipedia is not a vehicle for promotion. See Wikipedia:Conflict of interest regarding part of the rationale behind this. Wikipedia articles need to be written from a neutral point of view, and when we write about subjects we have a close connection to, such as businesses we have a stake in, it is impossible to maintain the proper emotional distance to write neutrally about it. See also WP:NOT for more stuff that Wikipedia is not.
  • Furthermore, Wikipedia articles are not owned by anyone, but rather they belong to the world at large. As soon as you hit the "Save page" button, anything you write no longer belongs to you, and you have no special rights over that text. Unlike pages at social media sites like "Facebook" and "Myspace", articles at Wikipedia are not "owned" by the person who created it. Wikipedia is a very different thing from Myspace in that way; it has an entirely different purpose. Wikipedia does have encyclopedia articles about businesses, but these business are notable businesses, the information in the articles is verifiable and neutrally presented and most importantly, the article content has been written by people who have no connection to the business and no stake in promoting it.

Regarding the article you wrote, insofar as it appears you have an interest in promoting the team in question, you should not be creating or editing any article about them. Even if you are just a fan, the writing you did was basically an advertisement for the team, and as such is entirely inappropriate for Wikipedia. The article also gave no indication of the importance or notability of the team. If you want to see what Wikipedia articles about sports teams are supposed to look like, take a look at some existing articles, especially those found at Wikipedia:Featured articles and pay special attention to the level of referencing they have. Of course, those articles probably took months and months of work, and the collaboration of many editors to get them to such a state, but any article still needs some minimum requirements and standards. Wikipedia:Notability is a good starting point. You may also want to read Wikipedia:Your first article which is a guide towards writing your first article, and which can lead to to other guidelines towards quality writing at Wikipedia. If you need any aditional help, please feel free to drop a note at my talk page. --Jayron32 06:17, 11 November 2010 (UTC)Reply


Thank you NawlinWiki for your response. I'm contacting a friend who i'm hoping will have far more experience with this than I have (which is none other than viewing other teams postings and not seeing how they were able to create their content given the options that were available to me). I'm not a web techy or code writer (clearly). I truly believe we have just as much right for our sports team to have a presence on wiki- as any other. Especially considering our numerous affiliations and associations. How we link with and reference those are what I need to figure out. I'll read through the material you provided and see how I can conform so as to not be deleted again in the future. Sincerely, Demalisha Durga- Founder, Richmond Derby Demons

No, I'm not NawlinWiki, he's another person entirely. I am Jayron32. While the writing was not necessarily great, that wasn't the main issue. The lack of clear evidence of notability was the issue. Basically, in order to be appropriate subject matter for an article, there needs to already be in existance lots of writing about the subject. For example, lets look at something like the New England Patriots, just to take a random other sports team. The reason that the New England Patriots is the subject of an article is not because it is well written, or because the Patriots team representatives worked hard to make it (in fact, Patriots team representatives are pretty much forbidden by Wikipedia rules from working on that articles, see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. The reason the article exists at all is because, long before there was an article about the Patriots at Wikipedia, there was LOTS of writing about the Patriots, such as books, magazine articles, newspaper articles, etc. etc. Heck, for many months of the year, I can find new writing about the Patriots in multiple sources every day. Thus, the Patriots are eminently notable (by Wikipedia standards), not because they are important to me, but because people outside of Wikipedia have found them notable to write about, like the people at Sports Illustrated, or the Boston Herald, or any of the authors of the many books which discuss the New England Patriots.
Now, this is something that also needs to be made clear, not every entity that exists meets this threshold. For example, I play on a softball team for my chuch. This softball team is very important to me, but no one has ever written books about my softball team. I can prove that the team exists, as there are schedules of their games published in a local newspaper, but that's really not much. There's no real newspaper articles, no journalism, no existing scholarship on my church's softball team with which to draw from to help write an article about my church's softball team. Furthermore, even if there were extensive writing about my church's softball team, I should not be the one to work on the article about it, since I play on the team, it would be very difficult for me to maintain a neutral distance from it to properly take an objective stance in writing about it.
Back to the article about your roller derby team. Insofar as there is no evidence that people have written books, magazine articles, or newspaper articles about your roller derby team, it doesn't appear to merit inclusion in Wikipedia. If you can demonstrate this to be false, and have access to books, articles, etc. or other extensive writing about your team, then the article stands a better chance. --Jayron32 06:50, 11 November 2010 (UTC)Reply