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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kiwi Camara (2nd nomination)

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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 no consensus, defaulting to keep. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 06:35, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Kiwi Camara

[edit]
Kiwi Camara (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

This page was deleted once already. Here is the page for the original deletion debate. The original reason for nomination is as follows:

AfDs for this article:

The notability of the person in this article is suspect. As of the most current edit, this article does not fit Wikipedia notability criteria (see Wikipedia:Notability (people)).

There are only three unique points in the article:

  • He graduated early from Harvard Law School with a fellowship.
  • He wrote an arguably offensive article.
  • He coaches high school debate at Mountain View High School.

Many people coach high school debate, some graduate early, and others let the word nigger slip out on accident. More than half of the article has to do with how Camara pissed people off. Not only is this article uncited, but one of its important external links are "humorous video at debate practice."

Crzrussian suggested that Camara's status as a former John M. Olin fellow in law and economics at Harvard is grounds for notability as a fellow is basically a junior professor; however, this is a misunderstanding. As evidenced by Wikipedia's article on the John_M._Olin_Foundation, the foundation gives a grant to fellows at universities, including Harvard. Now that the confusion regarding the "John M. Olin" moniker is out of the way, let us examine what a fellow really is.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition [1], a fellow at a university would be a graduate student appointed to a position granting financial aid and providing for further study. This means that a fellow can hardly be equated to a college professor of any sort- they are just not the same thing.

Furthermore, Jahiegel has argued that the publicity surrounding the racial conflict at Harvard and Yale would be grounds for notability and would merit an evolution of the article into that incident. However, I contend that publicity is not enough to substantiate importance of subject based on two premises:

  • Anyone can be subjected to publicity for any reason, good or bad. To set a precedent of writing articles based on the subject's publicity would be writing millions of articles about people who are potentially not notable. So, if there was any way for us to assume that publicity is a notability factor here, we would also have to assume that:
  • The reason why Camara's publicity would be notable is because he himself is already important. However, I have already disproven this assertion in the first half of this nomination.

Camara himself is not notable enough, which logically means that the publicity surrounding him is not notable either. Consequently, this article should be deleted. Big.P (talk • contribs) 04:43, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

All that has changed with this article since the deletion is the addition of sources/references. The problems regarding the notability of the article subject have not be addressed at all. The remake of this article is a blatant violation of precedent decided by a fair vote. This article ought to be deleted quickly. -- ßίζ·קּ‼ (talk | contribs) 01:20, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • I repeat what I wrote in the previous AfD:"Here's what we know about the Olin Fellowship on Law and Economics at Harvard:'..during the first eleven years of the Program, thirty-two John M. Olin Student Research Fellowships have been awarded to advanced graduate students for the general support of their training in law and economics.In addition, 104 Student Research Fellowships have been awarded to students to support specific research projects during the summer.' Also, we dont have articles on everyone who published a comment in the Yale Law Review. (If we did, I would have had a lot of fun writing some of them.) Fails WP:Proftest completely. Also, Prodigy-Schomidigy.
However: the controversy was certainly notable. At the time, there was a long article in the New Yorker that discussed both this and the Ward Churchill affair, treating them as if they were of equal importance. It has also been brought up time and again in the past year when people were discussing Larry Summers and his comments on women in the sciences. Ideally, I would support moving this to a page specifically dealing with the controversy.'"
In particular, I supported a delete of the page and a creation of a controversy page. I would not be outraged by a keep close as long as it is clearly specified that the consensus is that it must be a redirect to a controversy page. This is in keeping with policy. I don't think the Yale kerfuffle is notable at all, incidentally, except as a footnote to the Harvard thing. (Which is appropriate to the relative standing of the two... all right, petty, but irresistible.) Hornplease 04:16, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Keep though possibly not under his name. The incident was notable, he was perhaps the instigator, but he's less important than the overall events.DGG 05:22, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments a fellow at a university, and likewise a fellowship, can mean a whole range of things, depending on the situation. In this case he held it for the entire 3 yrs, so it wasnt a summer research award, and by the arithmetic above, it puts him as one of the 3 best students in the class. I think it possible that the best 3 a year at Yale law might be Notable -- even if it might be more at Harvard. :)
"the reason why Camara's publicity would be notable is because he himself is already important." That logic will exclude almost 100% of the bios. Except for hereditary monarchs, people become notable through the publicity they get for the things they do. DGG 05:31, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment No, being a very good student or teacher doesn't make one notable since these activities have a very small spear of influence. Similarly many child prodigies have very little impact on the world. A researcher with many publications is notable because their writings & talks influence their peers, who collectively have an enormous impact on human knowledge. Now lists of Harvard valedictorians or child prodigies are fine since Harvard is *very* notable, but membership doesn't confer notability on the people. So here we're really talking about the notability of the incident itself. JeffBurdges 09:26, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to mention that wikinews has a lower bar for notability of controversies, assuming they're still news, i.e. recent. In general, if you'd like to push a minor controversy, you should write an article there first, as it's less likely to be deleted one day. JeffBurdges 09:32, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Keep. As I stated in the orginal debate, I'm not over impressed with this entry but I feel it *just* tips the balance. Markb 11:25, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Keep from me as well. Following the previous AfD, I gutted much of the biographical information (which rambled about his being a debate coach and ballroom dancing), rewrote most of the Harvard incident (which was quite POV and unsourced), and ensured every assertion was backed by a reliable secondary source. I think given the non-trivial coverage Camara has received, most of which is now in the article, he passes WP:N, but it may not be appropriate to hang all of the Harvard incident in this article. I would be happy with a refactoring of that out to another article, or even a redirect to one, as others have suggested above. Although, at least one recent source focuses on the impact it has had on him personally, five years later: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/02/AR2007040201537.html. -SpuriousQ (talk) 03:39, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy Delete. It's very nice that he graduated law school young. It's nice that he overcame his childhood arthritis. Are these wonderful personal achievements? It doesn't matter. The point is that this person *himself* is not WP:Notable. The Olin fellowship, as discussed above, is simply a funding mechanism, targeting conservative law grad students (at several schools, not just at Harvard). I am very familiar with it, and it is no more prestigious than other named grad fellowships for aspiring law teachers that are handed out annually to more than a hundred students in the LLM/JSD programs of good law schools.
Assuming arguendo that the Harvard incident is notable, (which, very frankly, was bruited about by conservative author Jeffrey Toobin purely because Camara claimed, when his actions were first made known throughout the school, that he was being attacked by the "black kids" because he was an easy Asian target -- race-baiting always plays in the national press,) then this article is not what should be up to present the incident. If one retitled the article 2005 Harvard Race Controversy and let the rest remain, it would immediately fail WP:NPOV. Why? because to highlight one player results in a biased report of the incident. Compare the article's description of the incident with the evenhanded report from the Harvard student newspaper at the time of the incident. [3]
Can the Camara article in any way be considered a neutral recounting of the incident? And *without* the incident, this material is simply a vanity posting. Further, it mentions other live persons by name and describes their behavior quite negatively; this turns the article, which certainly will be consulted, into a weapon for Camara. And note: after this discussion, any decision to retain an article about Camara can be cited as proof that he is notable. It becomes circular. Dupuy78 09:51, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep.- I think that graduating from law at such a young age is impressive and notable.--Jondel 14:35, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep with 16 graduated from Harvard. The youngest graduate in the history of the school. Unless Harvard will be deleted because it does not meet WP:N, I would say that this fact alone makes the person notable. --roy<sac> Talk! .oOo. 05:12, 31 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment No, he didn't graduate from Harvard at sixteen. Check the article: he was born in 1984 and graduated with the class of 2004. That is younger than the usual graduate, but not by much -- a person who enters law school directly from undergraduate will finish at age 24. Dupuy78 09:31, 31 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • After writing the above, I went back to the article to see why people thought Camara had been graduated at sixteen. I saw that it did not state his age at graduation (as a casual reader would expect), but his age when he "matriculated," or enrolled.[4] I was thinking, "geez, that phraseology is pretty misleading," and then realized that the statement could not be true. The date of birth listed is June, 1984. But Harvard Law starts its fall semester in August. Therefore, Camara was not sixteen when he matriculated in 2001. I am pointing this out, not because seventeen is so much older, but because it further underlines the self-promotion that characterizes this article; a little corner-cutting on the truth here, a little sleight-of-hand with vocabulary there, and all to aggrandize the subject. Dupuy78 10:18, 31 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please assume good faith. I evidently made a off-by-one mistake with his age. I phrased it that way because that is, strictly speaking, what the source tells us: "He was the youngest when he entered his law class so it’s not unreasonable to believe he’s the youngest to graduate,” Harvard spokesman Michael Rodman told Philippine News." If you feel there is a POV problem, that's a quality issue, not a keep or delete one, and I'd welcome you to improve the article. -SpuriousQ (talk) 10:35, 31 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think Dupuy78 is just citing POV as only of the many problems of this article, including the lack of notability of Camara, which is why this article was nominated in the first place. -- ßίζ·קּ‼ (talk | contribs) 23:02, 31 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, ßίζ·קּ‼. SpuriousQ, you mistake my argument on several points:
  1. I did not question whether Camara is the youngest person to graduate. I said that the statement that he was 16 when he matriculated is mathematically impossible, and cannot be true. This comment was no attack on you. You stated in your "Weak Keep" vote above that you had gutted the biographical information, and I made no assumption that you had yourself written any of the bio.
  2. In explaining my "Speedy Delete," I did not base my rationale on a claim that the article was POV. I stated that if the article were retitled 2005 Harvard Race Controversy and were otherwise left unchanged, it would immediately fail NPOV, as it focuses on only one player in one of the numerous, separate events that constituted the controversy.
  3. In other words, the controversy itself does not support the retention of an entry for Camara, any more than it would support an entry for the fellow student who initially discovered the racist terms in the material he posted. WP:Living: If the reliable sources only cover the person in the context of something else, then a separate biography is probably unwarranted. ...Marginal biographies on people with no independent notability can give undue weight to the events in the context of the individual.
  4. The fact that actions of named live persons are negatively presented is also a problem, as it makes the article a weapon against those people, some of whom are in no way public persons. WP:NPF
  5. As I discussed above, the receipt of a grad fellowship is common for aspiring law professors. His age at graduation makes him some four years younger than the average straight-from-undergrad law student. This is simply not sufficient. Also, as Hornplease stated, he fails WP:PROF. The article should be speedily deleted because Camara is not WP:Notable. -Dupuy78 05:33, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Actually my AGF remark was meant more in response to your characterization of the article as "self-promotion" and aggrandizement, and I just wanted to clarify why the phrasing was done in terms of when he enrolled rather than graduated.
I see three living people named in the article, counting Camara himself. I don't see how their actions are negatively presented, but I'd be interested in improving that. But that's an issue for cleanup, not AfD.
I still think Camara satisfies WP:N. There are at least two sources (Phillippine News, Honolulu Advertiser) exclusively about him with no mention of the Harvard incident (one of which was published after the incident), there are several sources dealing with the incident with more than a passing mention of him (see the references in the article), and there are at least three sources dealing directly with the impact the incident has had on him years later (Yale Daily News, New York Times, Washington Post). Not that it's particularly relevant, but the first incarnation of this article had no mention of the incident [5] (it was my "fault" for adding it a month later, when I came across the article). -SpuriousQ (talk) 07:07, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Controversy isn't notable if the person involved isn't notable. Person's notability is not established simply by a couple of newspaper articles. There are newspaper articles all the time about people as ordinary as high school students (ie. HS athletes). -- Filabusta 06:53, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are well more than "a couple of newspaper articles" about this person, including several in state and national papers as well as at least one non-U.S. He's been featured or mentioned non-trivially in prominent publications such as the The New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Boston Globe. The ordinary high school athlete does not get that type of coverage. -SpuriousQ (talk) 07:57, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Actually, this is a highly suspicious comment, for several reasons. I suspect that Filabusta is actually Big.P. Please refer to Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Big.P (2nd) -SpuriousQ (talk) 09:53, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Too young to be notable. --Vlad|-> 15:54, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I remember reading about Camera when he graduated from Harvard as well as hearing about the 'controversy' surrounding those postings of his - and I'm Canadian, so his notability (notoriety?) has crossed international boundaries and, as such, merits an article here as much as some (if not most) of the biographic Wikipedia articles I've stumbled upon. If the main problem is apparently due to POV, then request an NPOV overhaul but I don't agree with total deletion. CanadianMist 16:11, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • The main problem is the lack of notability. That was the rationale for the first deletion decision, and the references added since then only emphasize the validity of the first AfD. For example, when you say you heard about Camara in Canada, what was it you heard? If it was information concerning his role in the controversy, then it is notoriety to which the WP:Living guideline applies, as I discussed above. -Dupuy78 01:28, 6 June 2007 (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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