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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. Not sourced? The the consensus is delete Spartaz Humbug! 11:40, 14 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Arena (MMA)

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The Arena (MMA) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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Contested PROD. Recreation of a CSD? (I'll have to check on that one) An unreferenced article written in the style of a promotional advertisement. Does not hold any WP:RS, completely unverifiable by third-party sources. notability not established. I am also suspicious of a possible WP:COI on the part of the article's main contributor, User:Mmasource. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 09:17, 6 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate the work you've done in digging up third-party sources that mention The Arena, but there are two problems:
  1. (less important) The sources you've mentioned are all very closely connected to to MMA, and as such could easily be construed as primary sources. One of the early lessons I learned about sourcing on Wikipedia is that secondary sources (like newspapers) are insisted upon, because they are used as the referee. They answer the question, "What is important to enough people that it merits inclusion?" A site dedicated to MMA may prove your facts are true, but it cannot convey notability outside a very narrow audience, and that is where such a source falls short for your purposes here.
  2. (more important) Even among the sources you cited, the articles only mention The Arena. Not one of them is about The Arena. If you were trying to prove that The Arena exists, they might do the trick, but you're not: you're trying to prove that it's notable to merit an entire encyclopedia article dedicated to it.
Until someone, in a good secondary source, writes an article about The Arena that mentions the athletes in passing, you don't have notability for The Arena itself. Unfortunately at present, all the sources you can find, adequate or not, have got it the other way around.
Best luck to you, —Rnickel (talk) 23:37, 10 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment from Mmasource* I appreciate the comments made here that have explained some of the ethos behind WP. I was obviously not aware of how detailed with 3rd party verifications I needed to be. I also appreciate Rnickel's comments specifically, as they have provided the most explanation to date. However, I would like to point out several things in regards to those comments, as well as those made by other editors above.
  1. MMA is widely accepted as the fastest growing sport in the world. It has provided 7 out of 10 of the highest grossing PPV gates for any televised event in the world for the past 4 years running (the other events each year have been 2 boxing matches and 1 WWE match respectively). Consequently, I would argue that the notability of the sport, its promotions, and teams is not something to be concerned with 5 years from now. This is what is happening in popular culture today. Additionally, an example was made for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. And it is just one promotion (albeit it the most famous for now) among many in MMA. Yet look what sort of influence just this one promotion alone already holds in mainstream society.
  2. Given that fact, no MMA team will ever match the fame of a promotion like the UFC. It is impossible, just like no individual football team will ever match the fame of the NFL itself. A sports team is not supposed to be bigger than the sport, particularly when it deals with athletes who compete in one-on-one sports like MMA and Boxing. Yet, a team can still be notable in terms of the athletes it trains to compete in such events. And the Arena is already such a team NOW, not a team to be considered in the future. This is proven by the verifiability (clearly referenced on The Arena's Article page) of the world-class athletes currently training there, including the current and most dominant champion in the history of Women's MMA (in itself an extremely notable occurence). To say that The Arena isn't recognizable just because its young is akin to a saying a new sports franchise team isn't recognizable because it was just introduced to a league. And much more so than franchised sports teams, combat sports teams like The Arena that don't actually compete against one another, but rather train athletes for combat, are that much more linked to the notoriety of the athletes who train there. So, most stories regarding teams that focus on training individual athletes are rarely about the team itself, but typically focused on the athletes who train there and why.
  3. I understand the points made about referencing specific sites concerning MMA (primary sources) versus more generic newspapers (secondary sources). Rnickel references this by citing tertiary source, which contains the language "Appropriate sourcing can be a complicated issue, and these are general rules. Deciding whether primary, secondary or tertiary sources are appropriate on any given occasion is a matter of common sense and good editorial judgment, and should be discussed on article talk pages. For the purposes of this policy, primary, secondary and tertiary sources are defined as follows: Primary sources are very close to an event, often accounts written by people who are directly involved, offering an insider's view of an event, a period of history, a work of art, a political decision, and so on. An account of a traffic accident written by a witness is a primary source of information about the accident; similarly, a scientific paper is a primary source about the experiments performed by the authors. Historical documents such as diaries are primary sources. Our policy: Primary sources that have been reliably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source can be used only to make descriptive statements that can be verified by any educated person without specialist knowledge."
  4. According to WP's policy above, these specific MMA sites I have referenced are appropriate as 3rd party references in this case, especially since I am not trying to provide an interpetation, but merely illustrating facts i.e. the world class caliber of the MMA athletes who train at The Arena. Any educated person without specialist knowledge could verify that given the primary sources I have provided.
  5. Also, to refer to newspapers as the secondary sources primarily worth relying upon compared to other sources is an anachronistic viewpoint. It does not take into account the reality of today's digital era, where (printed) newspapers are facing extinction. They are understaffed and solely dependent on advertising revenue, which often skews the authenticity of the reporting, as much of the information fed to reporters comes directly from sources such as brands, and/or the Advertising/PR agencies that are hired by brands, that pay for advertising in newspapers in order to feed the information to the public that these brands wish disseminated. For example, if The Arena wished to hire a PR firm to have articles written about it in a paper such as The San Diego Union Tribune, I am quite sure it would be very easily accomplished if The Arena agreed to buy some advertising from the paper. This is the reality of the media industry and to ignore this fact is naive. So would an article about The Arena written by a reporter from the San Diego Union Tribune (a secondary source that would qualify The Arena for inclusion based on the comments presented by the WP editors above) really be what everyone is looking for? By the arguments presented to date, it seems like it would.
  6. Additionally, these "primary sources" I reference in The Arena Article page such as Sherdog actually provide information to a far greater audience than might be imagined. As such, a "primary source" like Sherdog could also be construed as a secondary source, particularly since, like newspapers, they often serve as content aggregators that source info from even more primary sources. In fact, the number of visitors (readers, viewers, etc.) to "primary source" MMA sites like Sherdog are usually larger than the visitors to a typical metropolitan newspaper, let alone just the sports section of a newspaper where topics like MMA would usually be covered. For example, Alexa.com (the default popularity ranking site for other websites) currently rates Sherdog.com as the 894th most popular site in the U.S. In comparison, The San Diego Union Tribune (the main paper for San Diego, the 7th largest city in the U.S.) has it main website for the entire paper, Signonsandiego.com, pulling an Alexa.com U.S. rank of 970 (a higher # means less popularity).
  7. So does an MMA site such as Sherdog.com truly have that narrow of an audience? Or is its large user base that patronizes the site wide enough to allow the site to be considered a secondary source? Is a site like Sherdog not a much more appropriate "referee" than some newspaper like USA Today that often simply aggregates content from primary sources rather than actually providing any original reporting. For example, the Yahoo Sports article I referenced in The Arena Article was in fact originally provided by mmajunkie.com. So which is the better reference? Yahoo or MMA Junkie?
  8. But even more important than any of the preceding points, if you are going to have an entire category of Articles about various mixed martial arts training facilities like Wikipedia does, shouldn't the same standards be applied to those Articles and the teams described therein as you are proposing be applied to The Arena (MMA) Article? I encourage everyone relevant to this discussion to visit those various Articles on the teams just as I have done. They are located here [[1]]. In fact, I modeled The Arena's Article primarily from the other teams Articles. And most all of them provide far less 3rd party references than I have done for The Arena, with the vast majority of those references coming from the same or similar MMA specific sources that I am now being told are not good enough for the purposes of 3rd party verification for The Arena Article. Additionally, most of the references to the gyms/teams are made in much the same vein as The Arena itself is mentioned, with little specificity about the actual teams themselves beyond the athletes training there.
  9. So, is it really being suggested that by deleting The Arena's article page then all the other team's Article pages should be deleted as well? Because that is the only fair standard that would apply. Would that really serve the best interests of the users of Wikipedia, particularly given the sheer number of those users searching for information related to the numerous teams and athletes in MMA, as opposed to those users searching for information contained in some of the far more obscure articles that also populate WP that are allowed to exist?
  10. Finally, although most of the teams listed in WP's Mixed Martial Arts training facilities do not have articles specifically referencing the teams, there are other informations sources that do discuss The Arena specifically and I will provide links to them shortly. Hopefully, given this, I will have provided an abundance of verification for The Arena, especially compared to the other team pages that should be held up to the same standards.

In conclusion, I simply ask that the same standards that are applied to the other Articles for the other MMA teams contained in WP be applied to The Arena's page. Anything else would not seem fair nor in the spirit of WP. Thank you. Mmasource (talk) 06:48, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You make some good points, and they have merit. But I do want to respond to a few of your assertions. We have a guideline called WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, which highlights a logical fallacy about Wikipedia - if we have an article about one subject, we need to have an article on another similar subject. We must evaluate each subject on its own merits - The Arena (MMA) shouldn't get an article just because a similar gym in Los Angeles has an article. Each case is different - sources are different, details change, and you can't use criteria from one article to evaluate another. That goes both ways, as well - we don't delete one article because another was deleted, unless they are identical in content or format.
For sourcing, We require sources like newspapers because there is usually a layer of editorial control over the content. Contrast with many blogs covering the sport, for example, where anything can be posted from rumor to fact. We look at readership, to a small extent - the college newspapers are considered less reliable than general circulation newspapers, for example - but the number of readers at a site doesn't do anything to lend (or detract) credibility from the content.
I don't know how reliable Sherdog is - the fact that it doesn't always receive press credentials from the UFC is problematic - but that's a question for the Reliable Sources Noticeboard, and I'll ask them in a bit here. But, near as I can tell, the sherdog sources don't talk about The Arena - they talk about fighters associated with it. The core issue is that this is an article about The Arena, an MMA gym in San Diego. The sources have to talk about The Arena, not mention it in the context of people who have trained there. UltraExactZZ Said ~ Did 13:59, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with UltraExactZZ. Mmasource, again, I recognize your frustration. I have sometimes been similarly frustrated with "The Wikipedia Way". (My personal frustration is with the grossly unfair disparity in the standards of notability required for athletes vs entertainers.) Yes, it is uneven, but that's just the nature of the beast for an open-source encyclopedia. People work on what they have time to work on, and if they find one thing wrong, it's just not the case that now they're obligated to right all the wrongs in the world or else be accused of unfairness and bias. We all have jobs and lives; our efforts here to contribute something to the world and build an encyclopedia compete with that, but the hope is that by working on what we can, one piece at a time, we'll get it all right before the deadline.
One core way that we make progress is by working together in a cooperative spirit, even with those with whom we disagree. To that end, I'd like to caution you against statements about "witch hunts" and newspapers being corrupt. Be willing to consider that The Arena just isn't ready for primetime yet. Are you willing to consider that? That you may have jumped the gun and tried to use Wikipedia as a "leading edge" source of publicity that the mainstream media isn't yet ready for, when Wikipedia clearly defines itself as the opposite? Gut check time, y'know? Maybe you made a mistake, and all these nice people here are trying to spend their time telling you that in the most constructive and gentlest way possible. I think you can be a good contributor to Wikipedia, but why "kick against the goads"? Wikipedia will be what it will be. If you wanna reinvent the rules, OK, go for it. There are good places for that; you can start at the village pump. If you can form consensus among long-term established editors that we're wrong for insisting on established secondary sources, then good! Once that happens, all the arguments you're making will carry a lot more force. Until then, this is the way we do things. I know it sucks for your pet cause, but it sucks for mine too sometimes. (Have a look at [2].) That doesn't stop me from contributing about subjects that actually are notable by every existing standard, and I find my time is much better spent that way. I have tried cutting against the grain, and it's just too much of a drain. I have better things to save my emotional energy for. Even if you were the publicity director of The Arena, without any interest in contributing to other areas of the encyclopedia, I'd suggest your efforts would be better spent pitching yourself to real, mainstream newspapers and magazines (and no, you don't have to bribe them first with advertising; I spent two years of my life as a freelance writer, and always got paid for what I published, rather than the other way around). As a fan, why not look for MMA articles that have broken out into the mainstream, and spend your effort on those? I just think you'll have a much more satisfying Wikipedia experience.
Best of luck to you, —Rnickel (talk) 17:44, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the quick response UltraExactZZ. I appreciate it. I understand your points and I also understand the concept of WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. It just seems hard to imagine that an ENTIRE CATEGORY of Mixed Martial Arts Training Facilities listed repeatedly in WP would not have at least similar editorial standards applied to it. We are not talking just a few articles, but over 35 all clearly referencing each other that have been in existence for quite some time now. Are you really saying that the editorial standards applied to all of these articles within this category that allow these articles to exist in WP are not applicable to The Arena Article and that these other articles should be allowed to remain even if The Arena article isn't? Thats hard to fathom, particularly given the sources and focus of the references provided in these articles i.e. they are from the same or similar sources as I have provided and these same sourced references in almost every case primarily talk about the athletes at these other gyms, very rarely the gyms themselves. I would understand if we were talking about different articles in different categories, but not a large amount of articles all within the same category.
Have you considered that maybe those articles exist because no one has gotten around to proposing them for deletion yet? Whether they ought to be here or not is outside the scope of this discussion, which is about The Arena. This is exactly the reason why deletion discussion are handled one article at a time; otherwise the scope would be overwhelming and we'd have to consider everything at once. The problems cited are all with this article. What may be going on with those other articles isn't germaine. —Rnickel (talk) 17:44, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Additonally, if "a layer of editorial control" is the standard here, then magazines (which obviously have editorial control) should fall into the same category as newspapers, shouldn't they? And given today's digital era, wouldn't that apply equally to both both pure online magazines as well as offline magazines that reprint their articles online? Also, if "the number of readers at a site doesn't do anything to lend (or detract) credibility from the content", then a regionally focused magazine shouldn't be viewed any differently than a more nationally focused magazine, should it? So, if I produce a local magazine article (not a blog) about The Arena itself, would I not be meeting the guidelines the editors here are putting forth?
Many magazines are WP:RS, yes. My personal sense now, not quoting Wikipedia policy: National magazines carry more weight for establishing notability than local magazines, and "eZines" even less so. (It's too easy for two-guys-n'-some-funding to stick up a website, call it an "eZine", and now if we quote that, we're just quoting those two guys. Print publications necessarily imply a little bit more institutional gravitas.) However, that said, yes, if you have a mainstream magazine article about The Arena, then by all means produce it. :-) —Rnickel (talk) 17:44, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As far as the reliability of Sherdog being questioned because of their credentials being pulled by the UFC...that has far more to do with Zuffa (parent company pf the UFC) and Dana White. For better or worse, the UFC is the 800lb gorilla in MMA right now. So, although the UFC does a tremendous amount to propagate MMA and I give all the credit in the world to them, the bottom line is that if you don't play by Dana's rules then you don't get to play. So when Sherdog reporters leak info about certain activities at the UFC, or they give favorable coverage to other promotions that the UFC doesn't like, Dana responds. Just the way it is. Sherdog will have their credentials back again, as they've already been pulled numerous times before. Still doesn't affect the reliability of sources within Sherdog. In my view, if anything, it enhances them since they don't (overtly at least) kowtow to the UFC. Thanks for being involved in this discussion. Mmasource (talk) 17:28, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As for Sherdog, sure, call it a reliable source if you want to. It does have its own Wikipedia article, which goes into some depth about its editorial staff. IMHO (as I noted above), the problems with the sources are less important than the fact that there isn't in-depth coverage about the subject of this article, The Arena. If the way of MMA sources is to cover only the athletes, and not their training facilities per se, then Wikipedia should mirror that, so The Arena article would still be out of place. —Rnickel (talk) 17:51, 12 May 2010 (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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