Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Danny Sullivan (technologist) (2nd 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 keep. The policy-based arguments for notability are sound and demonstrate that the subject meets WP:BIO. (non-admin closure) gobonobo ^{+ c} 18:32, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Danny Sullivan (technologist)

Danny Sullivan (technologist) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Per subject request (see talk:). A web SEO salesman, not surprisingly, has acquired a WP article. Yet the article fails to clearly demonstrate WP:BLPN notability, mostly due to the quality of the sources used. A Google footprint is not the same thing as a notable career, of encyclopedic merit.

Previously AfDed in 2008, an AfD which was non-admin closed by a now-indeffed editor Andy Dingley (talk) 13:24, 12 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm not going to vote, but I will point out two falsehoods in the nomination. (1) Mr. Sullivan does not sell SEO services. He's a publisher and conference organizer. (2) The prior AfD was unanimously keep, and the closer does not seem to be indef blocked. close; clean block log Jehochman ^Talk 13:34, 12 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know what's happening with that AfD close, but Instinct (disappeared 2010) appears in the page history as the editor doing the close, yet they sign it on behalf of Milk's Favorite Cookie, who is blocked (2009) for account impersonation. Maybe this is all innocent, in which case I withdraw my comment. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:01, 12 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You've still got it wrong. The account was blocked and then unblocked 2 minutes later, probably because it was a mistaken action. To me it looks like the user might have renamed the account after the edit was made. (Perhaps Milk's Favorite Cookie became Instinct) In any case, the prior AfD appears to have been "regular". Jehochman ^Talk 15:52, 12 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:51, 14 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Advertising-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:52, 14 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:52, 14 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Businesspeople-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:52, 14 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Well-known, well sourced. --Davidcpearce (talk) 22:10, 20 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak delete Admittedly, at one time there were news articles about him -- 2 or perhaps 3 (I'm getting 404 on the CNET news link). Neither of the articles is what I could consider "in depth." Most of the other links in the article are blogs or non-stable/non-RS sources. Meanwhile, there has been little about him lately that would add to his notability. In fact, I probably would not have considered him notable during the first AfD, but at least then his star was rising. That no longer seems to be the case, and I don't see a lasting legacy. LaMona (talk) 22:13, 21 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  What do you think about the citations on the talk page? Jehochman ^Talk 23:33, 22 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  Replied there. LaMona (talk) 16:19, 23 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. Full disclosure: I don't know Danny Sullivan's world very well, and don't have much intuitive sense for who's notable in it and who isn't. But I took a look at the citations on this discussion's talkpage, and several of them seem quite convincing to me: notably the chapter about Sullivan in David Vise's book The Google Story. Also Ken Auletta seems to be a fairly eminent journalist and author, and for him to refer to Sullivan as "the closest approximation to an umpire in the search world" in his 2009 book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It surely counts for something. At least that's the sense I got from checking out our article about Auletta as well as our quite elaborate article about the book itself. Bishonen | talk 21:59, 23 June 2015 (UTC).[reply]

• Delete The provided sources are overwhelmingly just news articles quoting something Sullivan said or are primary sources. It comes across as a very concerted effort to appear notable without actually being so. Sullivan does not appear to meet any of the guidelines in WP:BIO. If Sullivan has done something notable that is of lasting historical impact in his field, I can see him being notable, but I am not seeing any evidence of this in his article or the sources provided. 217IP (talk) 02:01, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep - An article from Fortune this week calls him an "authority" on Google. He started the two top SEO news sites and a marketing site that is notable in its own right. You would basically be deleting the article of the godfather of SEO journalism. This seems like a lazy nomination. Actually research who you are talking about. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 04:49, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• The Forbes article given above is only a mention. Mentions are nice, but they are not substantial, as the policy requires. I think we are still looking for some substantial coverage that would attest to notability. I looked at some on the list provided on the talk page. Jehochman, so that we don't all have to look through all of the sources you found, could you point out the ones that show extensive coverage? for example, the NYT articles that I accessed [1] [2] [3] are each just a single quote from him, so that doesn't help here with notability. Ditto the Wired articles that I looked at. Thanks, LaMona (talk) 03:25, 30 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - I concur with the nominator. Searching for the subject online reveals articles that quote the subject but never discuss the subject. The subject's "notability" appears to be a Kardashianesque self-creation.--Rpclod (talk) 05:43, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Full disclosure: I work at Google. This is my first time participating in a "AfD" discussion; I don't know what the criteria are, and I apologize if I'm doing this wrong. I just wanted to say, from my point of view, Danny Sullivan is a widely recognized authority in the search industry. As just one example, he frequently appears on shows such as This Week in Google on the This Week in Tech network. 50.240.216.94 (talk) 22:35, 29 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Since this appears to be your first edit on WP, it would be good to read at least the policy statements in articles for deletion, the policies on notability, and the policies on biographies of living persons. Decisions are made based on those policies, not on the knowledge that persons have in their heads about the subject. If you want us to consider the This Week in Google as evidence of notability, you will need to provide resources that can validate the statement. So that means to also need to read reliable sources and verifiability of facts.If you plan on editing Wikipedia in the future, it is a very good idea to create a user name for yourself so that your contributions themselves have an author we can recognize, since IP addresses are not stable identifiers.Hope you stick around! LaMona (talk) 03:33, 30 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Maybe if you were nice to this person they would stay around and help build the encyclopedia. Instead, you were unfriendly to them because they didn't agree with you. Jehochman ^Talk 13:53, 30 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. Hi, I'm a novice at Wikipedia, so I apologize if I make mistakes on the decision criteria or markup. But I am a Distinguished Engineer at Google, and I would definitely classify Danny Sullivan as notable in the field of search. I'm happy to attest that people within Google take Danny's journalistic coverage quite seriously. I would think the USA Today and New York Times articles would both count toward notability, in that both pieces contain significant coverage of Danny, not just quotes from him. Likewise, the page on notability calls out author/journalist criteria such as "The person is regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by peers or successors." Danny is widely regarded as an important figure and expert source by both fellow journalists (in terms of the number of different journalists who quote him, such as John Markoff or Ken Auletta) and by search engineers as well. When I talk to Google founder Larry Page and say "Danny Sullivan wrote X," Larry might agree or disagree, but Larry knows who Danny is and his expertise. But it sounds like Wikipedia prefers published material, so I'd point back to the USA Today and New York Times articles. Or see Chapter 7 ("The Danny Sullivan Show") of the book The Google Story, by David Vise. MattCutts (talk) 05:00, 3 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Matt, Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a news archive. That you read some news articles by or about Danny Sullivan doesn't mean that he is notable enough for an encyclopedia entry. If you want to add his information to somewhere where it will be uncontested try adding to a dedicated news archive such as Newslines or similar. -- Sparkzilla talk! 06:53, 3 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What are you talking about? You are not making any sense at all. News is the rough draft of history. Of course Wikipedia articles can be written using news articles as sources. Jehochman ^Talk 13:42, 3 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

An encyclopedia is a summary of a notable topic. The questions here are 1) what is to be summarized? and 2) is it notable? By comparison, a news archive is not a summary and attempts to capture ALL the news about a topic. It is more concerned with what is newsworthy, a lower bar of inclusion than notability. If we were making a news archive about Mr Sullivan we would include all the news we could find, and consider almost every news article to be notable for that purpose. However, you are trying to make an encyclopedic entry. There appear to be several news articles about Mr Sullivan (plus some anecdotal evidence from Mr Cutts). We'll disregard the anecdotal evidence as just that, and concentrate on Wikipedia's rules. Of course, many WP articles are made up of news, especially those about news events, such as a train crash or a shooting. However, that's because the event itself is notable. In this case the question is: is Mr Sullivan notable for an encyclopedia entry? Saying that there's news about him does not make him notable, only that he is newsworthy. He's notable for a "who's who in tech" or "notable figures in the SEO industry", but does he really belong in an encyclopedia? Surely bored editors who are looking for something to do, and "inclusionists" will say yes, but that's a stretch of Wikipedia into something beyond its purpose. The question is moot anyway because the decision to keep or delete is made not according to the rules, but to the most powerful group on the page. The ambiguity between these two different functions (news archive and encyclopedia), and how the rules are arbitrarily applied by the most powerful group to suit each situation, is the real problem. -- Sparkzilla talk! 02:48, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I respect that view. I wish we applied it universally, but that's probably too much to ask. We'd have a lot less trouble with biographies of we had a high bar for notability. Jehochman ^Talk 03:15, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sparkzilla, thanks for the additional perspective. My impression was that simply being quoted in reliable sources that are independent of the subject didn't count for that much. But I was also under the impression that significant coverage in the form of a profile did carry more weight, and both the USA Today and NY Times referenced on the page about Danny Sullivan presented profiles of him. Likewise, David Vise spends an entire chapter in his book The Google Story profiling Danny Sullivan. Should that source be added to the Wikipedia page about Danny? (I don't know AfD etiquette, so I didn't want to edit the main page to add a source if that's bad form). Likewise, in John Battelle's book about Google entitled The Search, Battelle refers to Danny as an industry expert as well and thanks him. So my thought would be that Danny qualifies as notable based on the significant coverage criterion, and possibly also under WP:AUTHOR since two different authors of published books refer to Danny as expert or providing expert commentary. If it helps, I also found this quote in The Google Story which helps turn my anecdotal evidence into something more verifiable. The quote is "[Google founders] Brin and Page were not discouraged. They knew they had a better search engine and they sought a relationship with Danny Sullivan so he could help them spread the word globally without their having to spend money on advertising." So instead of me, that's a Pulitzer-winning journalist (David Vise) asserting that Google's founders considered Danny Sullivan an important enough figure as a journalist that they sought to build an ongoing relationship. Would that check the box for the first criterion of WP:AUTHOR? MattCutts (talk) 06:53, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Matt, I don't have a horse in this race. I respect Danny Sullivan and actually do think he is notable in the industry. However, you can see that my discussion is really about how Wikipedia works. As someone working on a different way to crowdsource biography and news-based information, I am very interested in finding Wikipedia's boundary cases. This is a perfect example. I believe the wiki software is ill-suited as a news archive, and fairly poor in general. An archive would work better for Danny's page, as it would allow more to be written about him, without the imposition of an arbitrary standard of notability. For example see this one on Paul Graham. In part, this discussion is driven by the fact that people want to be on Wikipedia because it's at the top of Google's search results. Talking about that, I think you will be interested in this blog post I wrote about Google and Wikipedia's co-dependency: (Google and Wikipedia: Best Friends Forever). You even get a name check. You may also want to check our some of my other blog posts on Google Search and Wikipedia's software. If you or Larry would like to discuss further, drop me a note ;-) All the best. -- Sparkzilla talk! 19:17, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, I feel this article shows notability, albeit it may need re-written slightly to improve the quality of the article. CDRL102 (talk) 22:43, 3 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment The discussion about the difference between Newsworthy and Notable belong on WP:N or the village pump. The very well accepted Wikipedia guideline at GNG is that substantial RS third party news reports make anyone or anything notable, unless they fall under the policy of NOT NEWS or other policy. The only useful discussion here would be in terms of whether the subject falls under that policy. (Myself, I have frequently expressed my personal dissatisfaction with the use of the GNG, and I would be very willing to modify it or even to deprecate it except for situations which can not be decided by more objective criteria related to the true encyclopedic importance of the subject. But my personal views on this are not the accepted guideline. We have accepted tens of thousands of bios where there is no substantial underlying notability , except that major papers think the subject worth covering. DGG ( talk ) 07:34, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, because Danny Sullivan is an industry leader in search and search marketing, this article if definitely worth it to be published. If SEO and Search Engine Marketing are relevant topics for Wikipedia, leading persons are too. And if Danny is not notable when referencing the search industry, then who is? Herndler (talk) 12:18, 6 July 2015 (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.