Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Commissioner Service (Boy Scouts of America)

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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 redirect to Leadership in the Boy Scouts of America#Commissioner Service. There is a general consensus that there is not a sufficient amount of sourcing about this subject that is reliable, independent, and substantial suitable to have an article about it. As there is a good deal of interest in a merge, article history will be left intact to allow for that if any editor wishes to do so. Seraphimblade Talk to me 18:16, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Commissioner Service (Boy Scouts of America)

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Commissioner Service (Boy Scouts of America) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log
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Here is one of many BSA articles outlining (well) one of the many organizational functions within Boy Scouts of America--articles on subjects that have no real-world importance whatsoever. Evrik just reverted my removal of blatantly unencyclopedic material, including, ahem, a section on the "wreath of service", sourced to the BSA website. Please look at the sources: it is ALL primary, it is ALL Boy Scouts. There are no secondary sources, and none can be found. This kind of content is just not acceptable--NOTWEBHOST would almost apply. Drmies (talk) 00:23, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

First, as I said earlier, I did revert the deletion. Much of the content was sourced. It's easy to say the content is unencyclopedic, but this should be discussed - not randomly deleted. Also, there are ways to tag the content for improvement.

Second, whether or not the content content has importance in the real-world is hardly subjective.

WP:Pointy. --evrik (talk) 03:17, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

Primary
  • Moegenburg, Michael (May 23, 2020). "Please Welcome Scott Sorrels as our New National Commissioner". Scouting Forums. BSA. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
  • "New Regional/ Area Commissioner Positions Approved" (PDF). Boy Scouts of America. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 20, 2008. Retrieved April 4, 2008.
  • "New Council Service Delivery Structure and Organization". Narragansett Council. 2010. Archived from the original on March 19, 2012. Retrieved February 12, 2019.
  • "Other Commissioner Resources".
  • "Commissioner Basic Training (using training manual No.33613F". 2007-11-16. Archived from the original on 2007-11-16.
Secondary
Unclear
Other sources that mention commissioners, or someone in the role of commissioner
  • International
  • USA
I can keep going. Finally, the article also has a historic listing of all the national commissioners. This too should be kept. --evrik (talk) 15:19, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per nom. None of the cited sources are independent, and a significant portion of the article is not sourced at all, even to BSA sources. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:12, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note to closing admin: Just to be clear, my argument supporting deletion is based on the nom and my own failure to find any non-primary sources, not any kind of "lived experience" that I brought up mostly in an attempt to be collegial and own any possible bias I bring to the conversation. Just didn't want that to get confused in some of the "side conversations" (that admittedly I suppose belong on a talk page ... meh). Go Phightins! 09:54, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge and redirect: I would not go so far as to say the position "doesn't matter in the real world", as it is one of the Key 3 roles in the Scouting movement. For the BSA's millions of members, the position is an important and well-respected one. From the standpoint of
    GNG, however, I too checked everywhere, including JSTOR, ProQuest, and newspapers.com, and can't find any independent secondary sources that have more than passing mentions of BSA Commissioner. ‎ So I believe the best solution is to merge its content‎ to the "Organization" section of Scout councils (Boy Scouts of America)‎ Scout Commissioner#Boy Scouts of America, leaving a redirect.  JGHowes  talk 15:12, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • User:JGHowes, that is just fine with me. My notion of "real world" is based on the lack of secondary sourcing--it's a Wikipedia-inflected version of the real world. Drmies (talk) 17:39, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • @JGHowes: what about these sources?
A Study of Boy Scouts and Their Scoutmasters: A Report of Four National Surveys. 1960. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
Norman Egbert Richardson; Ormond Eros Loomis (1915). The Boy Scout Movement Applied by the Church. C. Scribner's sons.
Labor Digest: A National Magazine for the Advocacy of Industrial Peace. Vol. 4. 1911.
Albert Shaw Review of Reviews (1911). The American Review of Reviews. Vol. 44.
Official Digest of the World|American Statesman's Year-book. P.F. Collier & Son. 1912.

I can find more works that speak to the role and the importance of the commissioner. --evrik (talk) 20:10, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • p. 115 of the University of Michigan book strikes me as one secondary source that is useful to promoting notability. None of the other books seem to be anything more than passing mentions, at best. Go Phightins! 20:20, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Some good Google books sleuthing there by evrik. I agree with Go Phightins! that Michigan U's A Study of Boy Scouts and Their Scoutmasters: A Report of Four National Surveys is the kind of independent, analytical examination of the office that supports the subject's notability (although digging into the data presented in the Michigan study, it appears that the Commissioner is often viewed as not the most helpful resource, in the opinion of troop leadership!).  JGHowes  talk 22:25, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I just added the following thirteen sources:

Only one is a BSA related source. --evrik (talk) 00:05, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

    • evrik, you added a resume from some company website and some other person's resume--and that is supposed to be sourcing? North8000, that's independent, reliable sourcing that discusses the subject of the article? Seriously? Nothing but a bunch of mentions, that list of evrik's. Drmies (talk) 17:44, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • @
        GNG-establishing source. Happy to discuss further if you could clarify. North8000 (talk) 18:00, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply
        ]
        • North8000, you said "good sourcing", below, and it follows evrik's list, so I assume that's included in the good sources. I looked at the article again--where is the "good sourcing"? A BSA article is of course primary; your comparison is off. We have articles on ballet dancers where the sourcing isn't written by balled dancers. And a BSA article is certainly not independent. The article's sources right now--where is the secondary sourcing that helps it satisfy the GNG? An article in Forbes could do that, if it discussed what the position was and what it meant--but what we get is this, a set of fluffy CEO bios where for one guy it says he "served as the national commissioner of the BSA". Now, it verifies this one guy had the position, so that's fine, but the only secondary source that says anything at all about the position and what it is is this, one single paragraph--that's it. What you are saying means that in any organization, any position (or office, or institutional strategy, or marketing campaign, or product) is notable if the organization itself has said enough about it. Drmies (talk) 23:29, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
          • FWIW, I think Drmies's analysis is right here. As I said above, p. 115 from that old book would be one source that in my mind "counts" towards GNG, but that's really the only one I see that is relevant. The rest are passing mentions, at best. Go Phightins! 01:16, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
            • Comment This is a moving target. The first complaint was that the article was all primary sources. Now, the complaint is whether the secondary sources are adequate. At this point we have moved from whether the article should be kept, and onto how to best source the content that is there. It would have been more productive to tag the article, and its passages, where it needed improvement - but that's not what the AfD was about in the first place. --evrik (talk) 15:19, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Good useful encyclopedic content, good sourcing. One note about sourcing arguments. Aside from, as noted, clearly secondary sourcing is provided, BSA is a large, decentralized organization with many facets to it. It is not correct to say that a publication having some connection to BSA makes it a primary source. That's like saying that for an article on the human race, any article written by a human is a primary source. It's also not correct to say that because is not so broad as to cover the broader world that that is a reason for deletion. That's not a wikipedia criteria; by that standard we'd delete about 90% of the articles in Wikipedia. North8000 (talk) 12:05, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Adding to that, this can be viewed as a sub-article to the BSA article. This is a set of roles that (an educated guess) perhaps 600,000 people have served in the history of BSA. We'd be doing a poor job if we didn't cover it. North8000 (talk) 10:47, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisted after a "delete" closure per Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2021 July 2. The discussion there might be of interest.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 11:40, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment it might be helpful if someone could explain what's going on here. The Talk page, where I would hope to find some discussion about the article's content has already been deleted, and from the deletion review, I can't work out whether the previous decision was delete, overturn-delete, or no consensus. My personal feeling is that you could embed the information from this article in the main Boy Scouts of America article, but it wouldn't sit easily, as it's much more thorough than any of the paragraphs in the main article's section on organization. I am not a scout, never was, but believe scouting is a sufficiently important organisation that I have no problem with multiple articles on facets of the movement. Elemimele (talk) 12:03, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete or selective merge to
    WP:RS; a facebook post, really? Of the high-quality sources I looked at (Forbes, NY Times), those are all just passing mentions in biographies of past office holders. Most of the content is puffery and/or trivia. This is already covered in Leadership in the Boy Scouts of America#Commissioner Service. I could see expanding that section somewhat by incorporating a small amount of the most significant and best-sourced material from here. I could also see breaking out the "List of National Commissioners" section as a stand-alone list (but the Olmstead entry needs sourcing). -- RoySmith (talk) 14:19, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    PS, this is also covered in Scout Commissioner#Boy Scouts of America, which is basically a copy-paste from the Leadership in the Boy Scouts of America version. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:29, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per my earlier comments, and my comments here, Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2021 July 2. All the problems listed in the initial nomination have been resolved. --evrik (talk) 14:35, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • And I'll just note that this is simply not true. There is no secondary sourcing that explains what the position is and what it mentions, and the sourcing is extraordinarily poor, and includes resumes and vanity biographies that mention that this or that person was a commissioner, besides primary material from the BSA, which cannot possibly add weight to the matter of notability. bTW, you already said "keep". No need to do it twice. Drmies (talk) 20:34, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or a selective merge to another scouting article if someone wants to. I don't see much of a case that the subject meets the
    general notability guideline, which expects significant coverage of the subject in third-party reliable sources. The sources cited in the article and those listed in the AfD are either written/published by the Boy Scouts of America or an affiliated organisation (not independent) or only mention the subject in passing, usually in a piece about a commissioner (not significant coverage). This is important, if a subject doesn't meet the general notability guideline then it's very hard to write a substantial article on it without running into big problems. The reliance on non-independent sources does really show in the prose. Hut 8.5 16:18, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Keep - Notable article that meets criteria for inclusion, and is well sourced. Meets the same criteria for inclusion as articles for Scoutmaster, Ranks in the Boy Scouts of America, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mokgamen (talk • contribs) 20:52, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - All sourcing issues cited in the initial listing have been resolved. Sweet68camaro (talk) 18:04, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • The trouble being, of course, that it's not well-sourced and the issues haven't been resolved at all. But this article is clearly someone's pride and joy, and it's not an advert, and in this encyclopaedia where we aren't allowed to delete articles about individual A-roads in Wales, or people who once played professional cricket for 15 minutes in 1973, or townships in Where the Hick, Utah (pop. 83), or that article about the precognitive octopus, it is simply irrational to spend this much effort on deleting it. "Merge" is the policy-based, ATD-compliant outcome, but the problem is finding someone who's willing and able to put in the hard, patient work of performing the merge in the face of the probable opposition. I'm saying that volunteer time is Wikipedia's only limiting resource, and, the person who spent countless hours writing this might write something massively encyclopaedic such as
    Geography of Borneo, if we don't delete their goodwill along with their contribution. I think deleting this is simply too expensive to contemplate and we should leave it.—S Marshall T/C 23:34, 10 July 2021 (UTC).[reply
    ]
    @S Marshall What's frustrating here is that people seem to be treating this like a popularity contest, with a large helping of COI mixed in (Mokgamen's user page says he's a BSA employee; Sweet68camaro lists scouting as one of their hobbies). I have nothing against scouting. I was a scout myself and it was a very positive experience. But, if your goal is to improve our coverage of scouting, the way to do it is to write good articles, not to write lots of low-grade articles and then defend them to the death. -- RoySmith (talk) 02:03, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Although we don't encourage people to write articles about their employers, I'm not fully convinced that it's a COI for a scout to write articles about scouting. It wouldn't be a COI for a musician to write articles about music, for example. People write about their interests and passions. You're clearly right to say that these users are treating the discussion as a popularity contest: I view their assertions in this debate as inaccurate and counterfactual. But the subject article isn't selling anything, and it isn't hurting anyone, and there's no intent to mislead or hype. I put it to you that the users resisting its deletion are entirely in good faith. I'd be inclined to let them keep it.—S Marshall T/C 10:11, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    You are correct in that COI was a poor choice of words on my part. I didn't mean to imply that there was a "pay for editing" type of relationship. And, yes, you are certainly correct that people write about their interests and passions. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that when you are closely associated with a subject, it can be difficult to step back and be truly impartial. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:31, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. This article is so detailed that it is only of interest to insiders in the BSA and the information should be in .BSA sources. Other articles such as Scoutmaster, Ranks in the Boy Scouts of America, etc mention above should also be in BSA material. Wikipedia is not here to give information to insiders. There is enough information on Commissioner Service (Boy Scouts of America) elsewhere.--Bduke (talk) 23:59, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Quite a few new sources have been presented here. The question is, do any meet
    WP:SIGCOV? Which of those discuss this concept in depth (let's say, a dedicated paragraph), or contain claims of significance, saying something like "the Commissioner Service is a significant" etc.? I'll ping User:Cunard who is good at dealing with lists of sources. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:52, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Comment - I still don't see why we need three articles (or sections of articles) dealing with BSA commissioners, viz., (1) Leadership in the Boy Scouts of America#Commissioner Service; (2) Scout Commissioner#Boy Scouts of America; and (3) this one. Because (1) and (2) are only 9K bytes in size, merging this one with (2) Scout Commissioner#Boy Scouts of America, given the duplication of coverage and the lack of independent secondary SIGCOV, is logical.  JGHowes  talk 02:57, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • JGHowes, simply stated, there is relation between all three articles but to fully explain this subject deserves it’s own page also by merging it with those other pages and then on balances the other pages referenced and makes it very heavy on this one subject. This is particularly notable because the scout commissioner article is international and scope. The leader ship article covers About 20 other positions. --evrik (talk) 12:30, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to
    cheap.) Extraordinary Writ (talk) 05:52, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Redirect to
    WP:GNG independently of whether the main topic is notable, so questions about independence of sourcing are appropriate here. --Enos733 (talk) 16:43, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Comment This has gotten complicated. The AFD sequence spans the various vintages of this article. And now there are sort of two different questions / situation blended. One of the AFD itself, the other the general one on the best way to approach this topic. Maybe the following outcome would be good. The AFD gets closed as no consensus and then at the talk page of the article we decide how best to cover this topic, with the possibilities including a re-direct/ merge. North8000 (talk) 13:47, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • I tend to think that any fair reading of the thread would have to indicate that the one thing there is consensus not to do is keep a standalone article on this topic. The crux of the issue seems to be whether there is anything here that can be merged, and although everyone keeps sort of suggesting that as a drive-by option, no one has actually taken any steps—either while the article was in user space or now—to effectuate that or even articulate how that would work, probably because there's not actually much worth merging. But if people are interested in a merge, we don't really need an AFD to get permission for that. Go Phightins! 03:14, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to article on BSA.John Pack Lambert (talk) 12:32, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The commissioner is a key position in USA Scouting. Alongside the Scouting professional and the District Chairman, they run each district in Scouting, meaning the position is notable. There is sufficient sources to support the article. — btphelps (talk to me) (what I've done) 07:00, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I have just had a good look to see how Commissioners as a whole are treated in wikipedia for Scouting in the United Kingdom and Scouting in Australia, the two countries I know most about. There are no articles specifically about Commissioners. Commissioners in those countries are just as much a key position as they are in the US. They simply are not notable in the sense that wikipedia uses that term. Are there details sources, independant of the Scout Movement, that talk about Commissioners anywhere in the world? --Bduke (talk) 07:31, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
While I think that this should will clearly need to be closed as "no consensus", (and my position here remains as "keep") I think that the discussion will need to continue (and I'll commit to doing that) at the article talk page. I'm likely to support that option at that later point. WP:Notability is a messy ecosystem, with SNG bypasses for topics that are 20 times less suitable for an article than this. One thing that emereges from the ecosystem (probably what you could call a mild invocation of WP:IAR) is that in reality informative enclyclopedic sub-articles that don't meet the strictest interpretation of GNG are routinely let in. Particularly if it is a big encyclopedic complex portion of the topic where unrelated secondary sources haven't made and covered the specific criteria for that divided portion. The BSA article (covering something like 80,000,000 people over more than 100 years) has too broad of a scope for that. Maybe Leadership in the Boy Scouts of America would be a good mid-level article to contain all of this. North8000 (talk) 13:44, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@North8000 Notability is simple; if there aren't any "unrelated secondary sources", then it's not notable. It only becomes messy when people stray away from that basic concept, as with the absurdly defective SNGs which exist in some topic areas. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:35, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Well, then time to get busy. You have about 4 million articles to AFD.  :-) North8000 (talk) 14:40, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Funny how different people read things differently. I see a clear "merge" consensus, which is even supported by most "delete" voters and in contrast to most "keep" !votes usually is policy-based. --Randykitty (talk) 16:22, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep As there are many reliable sources, merge as second choice.Jackattack1597 (talk) 11:20, 17 July 2021 (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.
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