Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Suicide of Tyler Clementi (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 snow keep, no point in keeping this open for longer as deletion plainly isn't going to happen. Bencherlite^Talk 00:21, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Suicide of Tyler Clementi (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • Stats)

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This is a procedural nomination following an editor's failure to nominate the article correctly for discussion at AfD (this edit and subsequent reversion). I will state my own opinion later, and the fact of this nomination must not be taken as my opinion. The matter has been raised on the article's talk page and also at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard#Suicide of Tyler Clementi. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 07:24, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 18:45, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Events-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 18:45, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep on the basis of notability and verifiability. This is a notable and tragic set of events and meets WP:GNG completely. More could be said, but that would be excessive. The article is under constant revision currently, with unsourced material being either cited or removed. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 07:26, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep and merge New Jersey v. Dharun Ravi with this, as they are intrinsically related. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:12, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Note the unpleasant turn of events at Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Deletion_Discussion from the editor who first attempted to flag this article for deletion. It seems to be turning potentially homophobic. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 09:43, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep on the basis of notability and verifiability. The suicide's notability can be seen by its extensive coverage in major national and local newspapers and all the network news channels. For example, see the NY Times Index for Dharun Ravi and the NY Times Index for Tyler Clementi. The President, the Governer, etc commented on it at the time. At the time, there had been a recent rash of 4 teenage suicides, most coming in the wake of bullying incidents. An effort called ["It Gets Better"] was started but really took off after Mr. Clementi's death. President Obama and others recorded messages and over 3.5 million watched, verified by youtube.com. Google used the effort as part of its TV advertising effort to show how important the web was. A critical factor in notability is a reasonable amount of coverage and it got much more than that. --Javaweb (talk) 02:33, 23 May 2012 (UTC)Javaweb[reply]
• Keep, obviously notable. The argument for deletion, in so far as I understand it, is a content issue, which should not be addressed through AfD. Do not merge with New Jersey v. Dharun Ravi: the prosecutors decided not to charge Ravi in connection with Clementi’s death, and so his suicide only played in the background of the court case, which is also notable by itself.  --Lambiam 13:21, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. The principle guideline here is WP:EVENT.

1. An event that is a precedent or catalyst for something else of lasting significance is likely to be notable. -- New Jersey passed an anti-bullying law, the New York Times cites this suicide as catalyst. [1]
2. Coverage of an event nationally or internationally makes notability more likely -- The suicide received and still receives international coverage, e.g., [2]
3. An event must receive significant or in-depth coverage to be notable. [3]
4. Notable events usually receive coverage beyond a relatively short news cycle. - Still in the news today, and has been a touchstone of reporting on bullying and LGBT teen succeed articles, many of the other deaths in the surrounding months have faded.

In my view, each of the four indicators provides a fairly strong indication of notability in this case. The original nomination's rationale is sufficiently far from Wikipedia policy as to be a source of concern. --joe decker^{talk to me} 16:59, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep per Lambiam. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:46, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep. It's a pity that there has had to be so much bad feeling erupting here in the wake of the news coverage of the sentencing of Mr. Ravi. The user who first requested deletion, at the article talkpage, has unfortunately made arguments that largely fall under WP:IDONTLIKEIT. If I look for the policy-based issues, they are these. The original nominator believes that there is very little reliable sourcing for the suicide page, separate from sourcing for the trial page. This is completely untrue, as an examination of the sources on the suicide page will show. The editor believes that Wikipedia should avoid articles about suicides generally, as suicides are usually not notable and motives are difficult to source. That claim reflects a lack of understanding of how there is ample sourcing to establish notability for this particular page, indeed a surfeit. As for how we cover issues of motivation, without falling into WP:SYNTH, there are legitimate issues of POV and of representation of source material, but these are issues to be dealt with through the normal editing processes, not through deletion. Indeed, there is an active content RfC in progress about that. As for the point raised above about merging the suicide and trial pages, although I have expressed, at the pages, some concerns about POV-forking, I believe that ultimately it is a good thing to have two separate pages, exactly for the reason of not conflating Ravi's conviction with the causes of the suicide. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:25, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep as long as it remains about the event and does not spinout to a Tyler Clementi article. The event itself is what has become notable. Tarc (talk) 18:44, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Meets notability guidelines, to put it mildly. No valid criteria have been suggested for its deletion, afaik, just a novel, WP:OR-based interpretation of the facts. Rivertorch (talk) 19:05, 23 May 2012 (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.