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. Sandstein 06:24, 15 April 2018 (UTC) reply

Christopher Zoukis

Christopher Zoukis (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)

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WP:BLP of a writer and activist, written and sourced differently enough from the first attempt to not qualify for speedy deletion as a recreation of deleted content but still not sourced well enough to actually get him over a Wikipedia inclusion criterion. Of all the footnotes here, he's the bylined author, not the written-about-by-other-people subject, of 20 of them; several more are his "our contributors" directories of content on the websites of publications he's been a contributor to (which are not notability-assisting sources); another bunch are Q&A interviews in which he's speaking about himself (which are not notability-assisting sources); several more represent non-notable literary awards sourced to their own websites (which is not support for notability; the extent to which a literary award counts as a notability claim is strictly coterminous with the extent to which media report the granting of that award as news); several more are to blogs rather than reliable media; some more are just glancing namechecks of his existence in coverage of other things; and still more are primary source documents, such as the texts of court judgements. Out of 52 footnotes here, there's literally just one that counts for beans toward making a person notable enough for an encyclopedia article -- and that one, a review of one of his books in Kirkus Reviews, doesn't count for enough beans all by itself as an article's only bean-counting source. This referencing is still not even close to good enough. As well, the creator has a paid editing disclosure on their own userpage despite having virtually no prior edit history (not even deleted contributions) prior to creating this -- thus suggesting that this probably is the paid PR job. Bearcat ( talk) 21:31, 28 March 2018 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. Bearcat ( talk) 22:48, 28 March 2018 (UTC) reply

• Delete sourcing does not pass general notability guidelines. John Pack Lambert ( talk) 02:08, 31 March 2018 (UTC) reply

• Request help editing rather than deleting. Consideration was given towards notability and thought it was met. As well, user disclosure should not be a consideration. Content is unbiased and intended to be valuable. Disclosure as a marketing professional is a requirement. SuperW from Canrank 11:03, 4 April 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SuperW from CanRank ( talk • contribs) reply

Yes, and the reason it's a requirement is precisely because the conflict of interest works against you if the article falls short of our requirements. It's impossible for us to entirely prevent paid editing from happening at all, but it is technically against our rules — we have no mechanism to prevent any of our rules from getting broken before it happens, and the only recourse we have is to review the results of the rule breach after it's already been broken. So we require disclosure of paid editing, because such articles require a special level of heightened scrutiny to ensure that our rules aren't getting gamed by improper sourcing and public relations advertorialism — but that doesn't mean paid editing is an acceptable path to getting a topic into Wikipedia. (For starters, if a person was really, truly notable by our definition of notability, then he wouldn't have to pay anybody at all to get in here, because the article would already have gotten created organically.) Bearcat ( talk) 05:06, 5 April 2018 (UTC) reply

• Other consideration - return page to DRAFT for continued work SuperW from CanRank talk

• Reason for creating the page was because Christopher Zoukis was found to be sourced on many pages when researching prison education, activists and incarceration in the US, including Incarceration in the United States, Michael Sabo, Prison Legal News, Arlington Heights, Ohio and List of law enforcement agencies in Ohio, and as an author, journalist and activist did not have a page of his own. SuperW from CanRank talk —Preceding undated comment added 16:00, 5 April 2018 (UTC) reply

Getting cited as the author of sources on other pages about other topics is not, in and of itself, a notability freebie that entitles a person to have a standalone Wikipedia article about him in the absence of valid, notability-supporting reliable sources to support it. Bearcat ( talk) 18:39, 5 April 2018 (UTC) reply

• Keep- Edits to the page have been completed to remove Zoukis sourced material and references. New sources added for awards and reviews. SuperW from CanRank talk 12:38, 5 April 2018 —Preceding undated comment added 18:24, 5 April 2018 (UTC) reply

There are still sources in the article in which Zoukis is the author and not the subject, and you still haven't added reliable sources that bolster notability at all: the awards are still referenced to their own self-published websites about themselves, not to any evidence of media coverage to establish that the awards are notable ones, and the book reviews are, apart from Kirkus, still from blogs rather than real media outlets. Bearcat ( talk) 18:39, 5 April 2018 (UTC) reply

I second comment made by Nom. Article is so overstuffed with primary sources that I am tempted to just iVote: delete as PROMO. However, my initial search did turn up this 2016 Seattle Times Q & A]: “My Words Are Dangerous”: An Interview with Christopher Zoukis (valid as evidence of notability, but all facts sourced to this interview would have to be qualified with phrasing like, "According to Zoukis, he was first arrested for..." . If someone is willing to reduce the article to material that can be sourced to WP:RS, feel free to ping me to revisit and make a (time consuming,) thorough assessment. E.M.Gregory ( talk) 19:18, 5 April 2018 (UTC) reply

• Delete as PROMO for non-notable writer. Fails WP:BASIC. News and book searches generate lots of hits on books and articles Zoukis wrote, primarily in Huff Post. There are also a handful of articles in RS in which he is briefly quoted. What is lacking here is reliable, secondary material about Zoukis. E.M.Gregory ( talk) 23:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC) reply
• Delete, PROMO for non-notable writer. Might be able to have an article on the book he authored if there are enough reliable sources to back it up. Author is just mentioned in most of the sources, some sources are not reliable. Kees08 (Talk) 05:48, 14 April 2018 (UTC) reply

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.