Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bill Hirschberg

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The result was Nomination withdrawn for meeting WP:GNG but not WP:NRU.. LibStar (talk) 00:26, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Bill Hirschberg

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fails WP:NRU which clearly states that pre professional era of rugby, players must meet WP:GNG. although over 100 years ago, could not find anything in gbooks or google. maybe if he played a few tests but 1 test and no evidence of coverage. LibStar (talk) 06:49, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment There are references to him in the digitalised newspapers in the National Library's excellent Trove service (eg, for 1905: [1]), but nothing in-depth Nick-D (talk) 11:46, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions. —Nick-D (talk) 11:51, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sportspeople-related deletion discussions. —Jenks24 (talk) 12:16, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep (again) you have completely misread the guidelines. It says "A rugby union person is presumed notable if he or she: Has appeared in at least one test match". So one is enough. Trove is not complete and does not cover all papers and relies on optical character recognition which is still often very poor, especially for long or unusual names. The espnscrum.com link is sufficient to prove that he played a test. The-Pope (talk) 14:12, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

you have completely misread the guidelines, it is all under a heading of professional sportspeople. Reread it, early day rugby players who were not professional (rugby didn't turn professional till 1990) cannot meet the listed criteria. LibStar (talk) 14:23, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

you should also note that for the most part in the early days of rugby as a strictly amateur sport it was limited to people who had earnt enough to pursue it as a "hobby" and could get time off work. For that reason, selection to teams was based on people's availability (of course they had to have some ability) but this never guaranteed national sides were the strongest. This is in fact one major reason rugby league was born, in order to financially compensate players who missed work. LibStar (talk) 14:31, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

keep I also searched on Trove here.
it seems he was in the winning NSW team for "The first inter-State Rugby game in Western Australia" there's a photo of him (& the team) here in Western Mail newspaper (Perth), and an article which seems to be a blow by blow recount of the match here (sat 3 Aug 1907)
he's mentioned a few times (as mentioned above, some of his mentions have spaces/errors in his name due to the OCR if you're reading the text to the left).
there's a Sydney Morning Herald article about the Australian team for NZ here (12 Aug 1905)
a notice about Combined Country vs City team in SMH 16 June 1910 here.
a mention in the Broken Hill Barrier Miner newspaper 8 July 1917 article about Fighting Sportsman (seems to be a team for army/war - it talks about another player who seemed to have been a mate, so this is a small mention, might not count?) here (though, this is one issue I think perhaps WP suffers when it doesn't include things like this (perhaps as supplementary refs), as sometime in the future these little mentions can help piece together a life too).
& another from the West Australian (Perth) newspaper 10 August 1907 here. Qld vs NSW game - SMH 11 July 1910 here.

there's not in-depth coverage (as in a feature article only on him as the topic), but I think it might be ok for WP:GNG? it might not meet the "Significant coverage" part, but I'm not sure how much coverage was given to Rugby Union players at the time (eg did they have feature articles written about them).

also, this rubgy archive shows up in google results but I haven't had a chance to check it yet Kathodonnell (talk) 16:34, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

& fwiw (comment) after reading the articles, it does seem like he was a decent player. played in (winning) NSW state games & Aus team for NZ tour. & this article (1907), the writer says "It is practically certain that the Rugby Union will send a strong team to New Zealand next year". (this is the article he had a few mentions). basically I think we should keep it as it might be useful to a sports historian one day as an encyclopedic entry. there were a couple of others, but they seemed to be along similar lines Kathodonnell (talk) 16:47, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep There seems to be more than enough from reliable sources to not only justify this article's existence, but to have a decent article. Trove will improve with time and with that will come improved text searching as the OCRs are corrected. Orderinchaos 16:58, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Trove test is sufficient Satu Suro 00:22, 17 June 2011 (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.