Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Jason Mraz

Poetlister 21:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Jason Mraz
No remarkable quotes per WQ scope and mission — FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 12:40, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Vote closes : 13:00, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Vote extended to 13:00, 28 September 2007 (UTC) to offset concerns of bias against subject, but content questions should be addressed — as always — by those who wish others to change their evaluations. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:48, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete appears to be using WQ for promotion or a prank. Otherwise, the quotes are not remarkable. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 12:43, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep per changes made by Jeff Q]. (I think the unsourced quotes need to be removed and will remove as Jeff suggests.) FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 13:22, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Support deletion, off the track, these kind of paltry quotations can be collected in daily life. Applew 12:45, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. --Aphaia 12:51, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete unless sourced, properly formatted, useful quotes added. --Ubiquity 14:40, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete, per Ubiquity. This person is certainly notable, but without sources, these quotes are not fully credible. ~ UDScott 17:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, given the improvements made by Jeff. ~ UDScott 16:01, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm not saying we should keep this article, but do we have a policy of automatically deleting any article without sourced quotes?--Poetlister 10:36, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete Notable, but of a living person who has a reputation of messing around with Wmedia. Will {{sup|{talk)}} 13:12, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep I'll be controversial here. Do we want to delete this chap just because he's annoyed people on Wikipedia?  That could give some people the wrong impression.--Cato 21:21, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete unless original, pithy quotes properly sourced and the rest deleted. Wikiquote, like all Wikimedia projects, always contains questionable information even about unquestionably notable subjects. It can take some time for Wikiquotians to clean up this material. But anyone who has deliberately attempted to use Wikimedia for self-promotion should expect its editors will focus their attention on ensuring that these articles strictly follow the project guidelines. Mraz is not notable for his Wikipedia activities, so I believe the Wikipedia quote should go because it's not especially memorable and benefits self-promotion. The other quotes should be scrupulously sourced or deleted. If we have anything left — say, perhaps, some of his lyrics — they could be the basis of a useful Wikiquote article. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:16, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I've been trying to find something I find quoteworthy in Mraz's lyrics, but with no luck so far. I enjoy listening to his songs, but the fun of them is the rapid-fire wordplay, not the actual content. Wikiquote is about pithy content, so this doesn't really translate well. (Paul Simon, one of my favorite songwriters, has a few songs that have mellifluous passages like this, where the actual words themselves don't strike me as quoteworthy, either.) I'm still trying. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:27, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. None of the problems I identified above had been addressed yet, so I moved the quote about Wikipedia to "Unsourced". (The blog is totally inadequate as a source as things stand, although this may be fixable, but the inanity doesn't impress me. Say something memorably critical about Wikipedia in the mainstream press, Jason, and I'll happily quote you.) I sifted through many of his songs, some of which I really like, but couldn't find any "wordplay" memorable for the words rather than the musical play. But I did find, among a bunch of reliably sourced articles, two quotes from Rolling Stone that I think are of some value. (I'd never have bothered to create an article around them, but I'm really trying to make this article viable.) With arguably useful, well-sourced quotes, perhaps we can clear out the unsourced or otherwise questionable stuff and declare this a reasonable stub. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:38, 28 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Comment There's at least one sourced, notable quote. Yes, it's strongly anti-Wikipedia, but as InvisibleSun says, |Wikiquote Wikiquote is not a collection of impartial, factual statements. It is a collection of notable quotes, including ones that are biased and misleading.--Cato 16:53, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * The Wikipedia quote is actually from a blog, which isn't a reliable source. Even if we can source it properly, the question is not whether it's pro- or anti-Wikipedia, it's whether it's quoteworthy. Merely expressing an opinion on Wikipedia isn't very interesting. However, if the quote garnered the attention of reliable publishers, it could be argued that Mraz's opinion is of some consequence and should be cited. (Contrast Mraz's self-serving quote with more significant ones, like criticisms from defamation victim John Seigenthaler, which are far more damning but much more important and relevant.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:32, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * We have no policy against blogs. The guideline WQ:SOURCE implies that we can accept them.  I think it's quoteworthy, and we certainly have no formal policy for deciding objectively what is quoteworthy.--Poetlister 17:30, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
 * To quote the draft WQ:SOURCE, "a published document (whether a book, magazine article, Web site, blog posting, or Usenet article) which can be reliably associated with the subject" (emphasis mine). This source fails to identify an author, date, or other important contextual or editorial information. You may have noticed that even the mainstream press is having difficulties vetting "interviews" that are sometimes simply made up by the authors. We must have the ability to confirm the legitimacy and ownership of a blog and its content before we can use it as a reliable source. When I was investigating this, I found that this "Ambassadors of Rock Official Blog" was being operated not out of the HardRock.com website (owned by Hard Rock Cafe, which appears to possess the logo and trademark "Ambassadors of Rock"), but by "onlinehome.us", which itself has some confusing ownership records, none of which tie it to Hard Rock Cafe. In short, we can't tell if this is someone appropriating the logo for their own promotion, or just a typically lazy and incompetent Internet-age publisher pathetically unaware of the need to provide bylines, dates, and editorial contacts for their material. (Yeah, it's probably the latter, but we don't make that call — the evidence does.) You might argue, "Surely Hard Rock Cafe would quickly get a cease-and-desist on such a trademark violator." To which I'd reply, "Yeah, like the music industry is so effectively stopping copyright violations by suing each of the tens of millions of copyviolators, one at a time." Coincidentally, I was in a dollar store earlier today where I noticed a Chinese knockoff manufacturer selling unlabelled markers. The packaged had the "Sharpie" logo prominently featured, although it was obvious they were made by a different company. I'm sure Sharpie will get right on that, Real Soon Now. &#9786; ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:02, 26 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep. It's certainly no great shakes as an article; but I don't see anything about it in particular to have it deleted according to our current practices. What, for that matter, is our actual consensus on unsourced quotes for living subjects?  There's a general feeling among us that we should be wary of this practice.  The reasons for this are several: verifiability, POV, legal issues, etc.  At the same time, many articles are created every month which are no better or worse than this one.  Will it be our policy now, or at least our practice, to go through  articles on living subjects as we find the time and effort to work on them: deleting unsourced quotes; deleting articles without sourced quotes; rejecting all new articles without sourced quotes?  We haven't made this viewpoint a policy; as for our practice, it is, however reluctantly, the opposite.  If we delete this article, it should be as a part of a consensus on practice rather than as an exception now made in an attempt to set a higher standard.  We might also consider, while we're at it, the somewhat arbitrary distinction between the living and the dead.  If the subject of an article dies, does this suddenly change how we deal with his page?  This question of sourced vs. unsourced quotes will become a matter, I would imagine, involving our policy toward all articles.  Now that our community has grown a bit, assisted greatly in our daily work by the addition of new sysops, and with  some earlier sysops no longer a part of the project, the time might be coming to arrive at a new policy on this fundamental question. - InvisibleSun 19:13, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * InvisibleSun makes some very good points. But I still don't think we have the active community bandwidth for doing a more methodical job. The spectrum of work on a wiki project goes from loose policies informally and sporadically applied to articles as regular editors find them, to tight policies with a large set of regulars methodically applying them, usually by reviewing maintenance categories. Right now, English Wikiquote is in-between on general policies, with only a few well-defined and frequently applied, and still appears to be suffering from a deficit of regular editors who routinely apply almost any cleanup policy to any articles. Comparing the number of new and heavily aggrandized articles every week with the corresponding maintenance efforts of policy-savvy editors, I think we're lucky we even get cleanup tags applied regularly. The actual execution of cleanup work, I believe, is still 1-2 orders of magnitude below the need for it. Unless and until we have a cleanup effort worthy of the cleanup work to be done, I think our general practice will still necessarily focus on those few articles that are brought to community attention through WQ:VFD and WQ:VP, to which we should feel we can apply policies and hope that we're at least setting good examples. I beg the community to prove me wrong and start tackling the cleanup in a major way. &#9786; ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:42, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * One thing that would help with cleanup, even with our limited resources, would be this: a consensus, in practice or policy, about the creation of articles with nothing but unsourced quotes. Suppose, for example, our community were to decide: "No unsourced quotes for living subjects." Certainly it would be a slow and exhausting task to go through all our pages and rework them; but consider, on the other hand, how much it would achieve when it came to overseeing new pages.  It would mean that many new articles, instead of getting a cleanup tag, would simply be deleted.  Other new pages, though kept for sourced quotes, would be shorn of anything unsourced; and this, in turn, would mean  adding fewer pages to the cleanup pile. Right now we seem to be of two minds about unsourced quotes: we don't like them and would rather not have them, and yet we balk at the thought of simply rejecting them.  We wonder if most of them will ever be sourced; and yet we discover that most of them, when sourced, turn out to be genuine.  We feel that unsourced quotes are a kind of rebuke to us, since we pride ourselves on being an alternative to all those lists of unreliable quotes; and yet we worry what would be left us, whether in articles or editors, if we said  "You must source what you add." Unless we agree on what we want to be doing, would it matter if we had ten times as many people to do it? So I reluctantly accept this article as is. It's one thing to use an article to draw attention to an important point; but since we don't actually use VfD discussions for policy, it seems to me that all we would be doing here is rejecting one article by treating it as an exception to our practices. - InvisibleSun 02:45, 25 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I must differ with InvisibleSun on a couple of points he makes. First, VfD discussions often do lead to policy changes. Unfortunately, we'eve never methodically collected the arguments in these discussions (although I'm starting to do this myself), but there are many links to these discussions in our policy talk pages. (Again, unfortunately, many earlier ones may be broken because they came before we moved to the subpage system.) I also don't think most unsourced quotes turn out to be accurate. Besides the wholesale lots of unsourced quotes that get deleted because the articles containing them are deleted, based on my not-inconsiderable sourcing work, I'd say that very many quotes cannot be confirmed, and the ones that can be sourced are frequently wrong in a substantive way. That said, I agree that we seem to be of two minds on the value of unsourced quotes, and the problem of pushing sourcing vs. encouraging additions (which are nearly always unsourced). I'm a strong advocate of sourcing, but even I shudder at the effect mass deletion of unsourced quotes would have on the community, especially new editors. I can say that if we had ten times the number of editors contributing more effectively (i.e., minimal sourcing, better formatting, less vandalism), I'd spend a lot more of my time working on sources. (It's been my primary focus on Wikipedia for the past year.) Barring mass deletions, until we have organized, substantial cleanup work being done, we must use our available tools — WQ:VFD and WQ:VP — to call attention to problem articles, or virtually nothing will get done. It's not very satisfying, only pragmatic. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:52, 25 September 2007 (UTC)