Talk:Erastes (author)

Untitled

I am going to add the ISBN numbers and details on the short stories in due course. I hope the article is relevant. -- Vash

Prod

For the record, I do agree that this article has sourcing problems; however, a writer who has been a shortlisted nominee for a legitimately notable literary award is always a valid article topic with no exceptions. We should rightly strip the article back to that which can be properly sourced (which is admittedly the work much more than any particularly substantial biographical detail about her), but such time until the Lambda Literary Awards retroactively denominate her from the award that she was nominated for, the fact that she did garner a nomination does make her a validly notable article topic as long as we stick to the properly sourceable facts and don't violate BLP.

Also, for the record, the article is not an "orphan" as claimed in the prod nomination, as she is linked from Transgression, Cleis Press, 2010 Lambda Literary Awards and the disambiguation page at Erastes. Bearcat (talk) 03:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

• I disagree with your premise; she did not win a Lambda Award, a work of hers was nominated for one. I can't think, offhand, of any presumptive notability criteria giving any props to also-rans ... and the Lambdas can scarcely be mentioned for prominence in the same breath as the Pulitzers or Bookers, say. In any event, that the award carries no presumptive notability is evident in so far as the winner of her category in that year has no article, as indeed half the winners that year don't.

  That being said, what particularly concerns me is the complete lack of reliable sources. I couldn't find a single news item on Google discussing her (as opposed to Transgressions). Blogs, yes, but reliable sources, no. This is of course a predictable roadblock when dealing with an article on an anonymous subject, but a living subject for whom there is no reliable sources just plain fails WP:BLP, no matter the reason. Ravenswing 06:11, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I didn't say she won it; I said she was nominated. But firstly, our notability guidelines do not require that a person wins an award to be considered notable — that's certainly a criterion that removes any doubt that may still exist, but it's not a requirement that all writers have to meet to qualify, any more than it's a requirement for all actors or all musicians to have won awards to be included. In actual fact, our notability rules quite explicitly do allow for shortlisted nominees for major awards to also be notable enough by virtue of the nomination alone.

And secondly, the Lambda is a notable literary award. The number of writers on that article who do or don't already have articles of their own does not constitute a reflection on the notability of the award or the writers — there are tons of topics, even today, on which Wikipedia should have articles but does not yet. A redlink just means nobody's gotten around to it yet, but does not mean that the topic is automatically not notable just because somebody hasn't already gotten around to it — if it did, then all new articles that get created today would automatically be non-notable just by virtue of the fact that they hadn't already been written about years ago. But that's not how it works; when an article gets created is not a determining factor one way or the other in whether the topic is notable or not.

In fact, LGBT literature suffers from a systemic bias on Wikipedia; the number of redlinks that exist is not a comment on the notability of the award or the writers, but on the fact that there aren't nearly enough editors doing the necessary work to get the subject area's coverage up to snuff. A lot of people in that genre who are unequivocally notable enough for Wikipedia articles don't have them yet — their lack of articles does not prove that they're not notable, but that there aren't enough editors tackling the subject area in the first place to get all the notables identified and written about in a timely fashion. The number of redlinks that appear in a Lambda Literary Awards list is not proof that the award itself isn't notable — it's a problem that Wikipedia has to fix, by paying a lot more attention to the topic than it has been.

So the question here is how do you propose that we deal with the fact that 2010 Lambda Literary Awards needs to be at least allowed to link somewhere for every writer whose name appears in it? Not every writer in it actually has an article yet, granted — but every writer in it needs to be allowed to have an article, because there are absolutely no circumstances under which a notable award, regardless of field, can ever have a nominee listed on it who is permanently barred from ever having an article. We're not even covering the award properly if there are nominated writers who are actually consigned to a "we're not allowed to actually tell you anything else about this person or their work" pile.

Again, I'm not objecting to keeping the article to a bare minimum and not getting into unsourced BLP assertions. But the award's article has to be able to link somewhere for every writer whose name appears in it with no exceptions. And, in fact, another editor has been adding further sources since this discussion ended — I haven't fully reviewed them yet to see if there's enough there, but once I do that I'm fully prepared to officially decline the prod if I'm comfortable with the quality of the new sources. (I am, for the record, not the original creator; I just didn't immediately decline the prod upon initiating this discussion because I agree that there are sourcing problems here and just disagree on what our response to that should be.) Bearcat (talk) 23:06, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

As far as the "systemic bias" element goes, for the sake of discussion, I don't think I agree with you that this is a "problem," per se. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that reflects what the world considers important; it's not a method of social engineering which decides, based on our subjective philosophies and politics, what the world should consider important. I've been in many a deletion discussion where Keep proponents have stated that some obscure subject or another should be more prominent in the world. In some cases those are defensible arguments, but the moment we start entertaining them on Wikipedia, we've just declared that our fallible, changeable editorial judgment -- which carries all manner of innate biases -- just replaced objective standards. I oppose that. Ravenswing 01:35, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

The problem with that argument is the questionable notion that Wikipedia's volunteer base, and its particular areas of expertise, actually provides an accurate reflection of what is genuinely important in the world. Our editorbase is very disproportionately weighted toward white male middle class internet-culture geeks in first world nations, who naturally concentrate their efforts on what they care about — which means, for example, that we get articles about every last viral video that gets posted to YouTube and every individual character in the latest hit anime film and every new Android app, while for some African countries we're still missing articles (or have only barebones stubs that are in desperate need of expansion) about some of their former presidents. The latter topic is inarguably more important for an encyclopedia to cover — but the kind of people who are actually drawn to contribute to Wikipedia on a regular basis are vastly more likely to devote their efforts to padding out the former, just because that's what they know and care about. That's what the "systemic bias" issue is about: because Wikipedia draws a disproportionately large chunk of its editor base from one particular demographic group while many others are underrepresented, what we end up devoting our attention to is not accurately representative of real-world importance.

I do realize what you're getting at — it is certainly true that some people want to use Wikipedia to promote their own fringe issues and minor personalities and quirky interests with little real-world coverage, out of the misplaced sense that Wikipedia's a useful tool to help them become more famous and important. But LGBT literature is not an unsourceable fringe issue; it's a real thing, with reams and reams of coverage out there about it, which is — not "should be", not "I wish it were", but "already is" — more genuinely notable than the amount of work that Wikipedia's non-representative editor base is actually devoting to it. It's quite extensively covered in reliable sources, for example; there are literally hundreds of writers in the genre who do have more than enough reliable source coverage out there to pass our notability rules, but don't have articles yet because the set of "people who actually contribute regularly to Wikipedia" has a much lower degree of overlap with "people who are knowledgeable enough to contribute good work on the topic of LGBT literature" than it does with many other topics that are objectively less important or encyclopedic than LGBT literature is. There is a big difference between that fact and wanting to use Wikipedia to promote a poorly sourced or unsourceable fringe topic. Bearcat (talk) 02:42, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

For the record, I have now reviewed the added sources. Although some sourcing improvement is still certainly needed and welcome, there are some rather meaty ones that have been added — including an article in The Globe and Mail, one of the top gold-standard sources anywhere for anything, which interviews her personally and gives literally as much detailed biographical information as we could ever hope to have about a pseudonymous writer — although she's not the sole topic of the article, as two other writers are interviewed alongside her, it focuses on her more than substantially enough to count as a solid source. Accordingly, I do now feel comfortable enough to deprod the article. Bearcat (talk) 00:07, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

• Yep, I would concur; good detective work there. And thank you for your courtesy in not just yanking the prod on sight, as many folks do. Ravenswing 01:35, 13 July 2013 (UTC)