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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Edinburgh Predators

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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 delete. Cirt (talk) 03:09, 6 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Edinburgh_Predators

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AfDs for this article:
Edinburgh_Predators (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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non notable UK university sports team, which fails WP:GNG as per Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Durham Saints

What exactly is it that defines this team as non notable? The BUAFL is an American Football league, recognised by the NFL[1] and reported by such media outlets as Channel 5[2] and The Daily Mirror [3].

The BUAFL has its own wikipedia page and, as such, surely there should be information provided by all the member teams. Perhaps this information should be included in the BUAFL article but with 56 teams in the league, the largest university American Football League in Europe[4], that would make the article unwieldy.

Of those 56 teams, 46 have wikipedia pages. Many of those pages feature a greater depth of information than the Predators page but that is largely down to their having played in the league for nearly 20 years. The Predators are in their first season, so the page cannot be expected to be in such depth as, say, the Bath Killer Bees.

In the topic, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Durham Saints, one of the points made was this,

"The university football and rugby teams dont have pages and they are far greater in terms of participation and interest at UK universities"

That may be true of Durham University, but at the University of Edinburgh there is a wikipedia page for Edinburgh University A.F.C., Edinburgh University RFC and Edinburgh University Boat Club. If these clubs are granted an article, despite not playing at the highest amateur level, why can't the Edinburgh Predators have a page.

Finally, I would argue that wikipedia is a point of reference, a tool for finding information about things that you are interested in. For example, if someone was interested about the village of Torphins in Aberdeenshire, Scotland they could come onto wikipedia and find some basic information about that place that they could not on the wider web, since such information cannot be found. In articles such as these, it is the collective general knowledge of people that form a comprehensive, if short, summary of the topic. My point here is that, while the BUAFL or the Edinburgh Predators might not be notable to you, they may be notable to others. Other people may wish to use wikipedia to view the Edinburgh Predators page as means of reference, to supplement the limited information provided on the web (what is provided is cited in the article).

Thus, I see little reason to delete the page (my sincere apologies for the extended response!). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.236.111.101 (talk) 13:40, 10 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

References

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  1. ^ http://www.nfluk.com/news/NFLBUAFL_121108.html
  2. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnGhrMDxcKk
  3. ^ http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/fourth-down/buafl/
  4. ^ http://www.buafl.net/history.asp

The reason that the team are not notable is that they fail to meet the guidelines set out for notability at WP:Athlete. This states that 'the highest level of amateur sport' is needed, since this is not the highest level of amateur sport, even in as minority a sport as University level American Football, which receives little to no interest in the UK in terms of media coverage and attendances, then the notability of any of the teams in this league is not sufficent for wiki entries, as established in the Afd for Durham Saints.

Regarding your sources, the channel 5 clip shows a discontinued(?) late night sports programme on a minority channel, for the main part, laughing at the names of the teams in the league. Besides, the notability of the league, which those sources support is not the question here, but the notability of the individual teams within the league. Some sort of table showing the teams in the league should be included on the league page, but all these individual entries with pointless facts and match by match accounts which are only of interest to those that played in the matches are unencyclopedic. I was active on bringing Durham Saints through AfD and will put each of the other pages through in due course, none of them are likely to be notable enough, but each should be able to make its individual claim of notabililty. This particular team looks to have played less than ten matches in a non-notable amateur univeristy sport league.

Re your argument regarding the other university teams, you should read WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, as an aside my personal view is that i agree with the contributor in the AfD for Durham Saints who stated: "they (football and rugby) are far greater in terms of participation and interest at UK universities". Petepetepetepete (talk) 16:40, 10 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There is little point in my arguing further, since I'm somewhat over a barrel in terms of the rules stipulated in the articles that you suggested I looked at. All I will say is that regardless of how popular a university sport is, if you are to delete this article for failing the WP:Athlete notability criteria, then you must also delete the university football, rugby and rowing articles, since none of them meet those criteria. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.236.111.101 (talk) 22:23, 10 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - No, we won't be getting rid of the football team: as a bare minimum, you have to take part in your country's national cup. They've done that. (I can't vouch for the other two, though.) DitzyNizzy (aka Jess)|(talk to me)|(What I've done) 16:17, 15 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Tim Song (talk) 02:30, 22 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • The top amateur level in the UK is British American Football League. This is not a BAFL club, it's a BUAFL (university-level) club. Saying that this is the British equivalent of an NCAA club is misleading for two reasons: firstly, it implies that the profile of university sport is equivalent to that in the US, and secondly it implies the profile of American Football is equivalent to that in the US. Both are false.
University/College-level sport in general has a very low profile in the UK. Most university sports fixtures - and American Football is no exception - get few if any spectators who are not actually members of the clubs concerned. American universities have stadia so that people can watch their matches. Spectators at British university sports matches generally sit on the touchline. In all but a very few cases, the idea of televising university sport in the UK (as in the US) would be absurd - even for a high-profile sport like (Association) Football or Rugby Union.
But American football is not a high-profile sport in the UK. It has a very low profile in the UK. And what profile it has is almost exclusively geared towards the NFL, rather than the domestic game. The profile of domestic American Football in the UK is not much higher than the profile domestic Rugby Union in the US. I would argue that, even if a club is at the highest available amateur level of a low-profile sport, it is not necessarily notable, particularly in the absence of independent reliable sources. This is not a case where the highest available level is the Olympics or something.
In the US, the NCAA produces a high-profile format of a high-profile sport. In the UK, the BUAFL produces a low-profile format of a low-profile sport. There is no equivalence between the two. And we cannot assume that a team in such a league is notable - particularly in the absence of independent reliable sources from which a policy-compliant article could actually be written. Pfainuk talk 18:52, 22 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Not necessarily. Strip out everything that fails basic policy requirements such as WP:V and WP:NOR, and in most if not all cases you're left with nothing to merge. Pfainuk talk 10:39, 30 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, –Juliancolton | Talk 14:38, 30 December 2009 (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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