I've appreciated your help on radioi articloes before, so I'm hoping you'll be able to help again. I keep coming across lenthy, detailed, and sometimes quire well written articles on UK radio stations. However, some of them are little, or even totally unsourced. I don't want to sound naïve on this, because I know the rules, but is there a special disposition for radio articles not to need references? our WP:WORCS is going to start getting quite merciless with such articles, and as we don't have the subject knowledge, all we can do will be delete. I don't want to do tis because ironically I'm actually an inclusionist. What can we do? --Kudpung (talk) 04:09, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
:From my knowledge of the Radio WikiProject, there is a widely held belief that any licensed radio station (they, being mostly made up of American editors, will focus on the FCC, but Ofcom would equally apply) automatically gains notability, hence won't get deleted. The Broadcast notability standards found at WP:BCAST is a little different:
{{cquote|Radio stations - There are considerably more radio stations in existence than television stations, some with large audiences and some with small. However, radio stations tend to have long histories and while the owners and formats change, the stations generally stay put. Notability can be established by either a large audience, established broadcast history, or unique programming...}}
:We can ignore the bits on repeater or translator stations as they don't apply to UK articles. The answer nowadays is there in bold, but of course would need to be covered by references, which many editors don't bother in doing. Do be aware though that the notability standards I mentioned there are from an essay and are not part of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, so they can only be used as a pointer to what should be covered and referenced in an article, and may assist in any AfD consensus. It's difficult to call as to where we should go from here, a rash of AfD nominations may wake up editors to establishing notability, but could potentially also be seen as disrupting Wikipedia to make a point, whilst just adding {{tl|unreferenced}} and {{tl|refimprove}} will not wake people up to the problem and the apathy to continuing to not add references and establish notability for the article subject will just continue. Ultimately the only answer could be to be bold and do it yourself, by either adding the references yourself (I added some links to radio websites which can help along with Google News Archive), nominating articles to AfD now and again or to just keep the status quo.
:Where editors cannot be bothered in adding references to an article is more than likely a widespread issue and needs to be discussed (if it hasn't already) with the community at large. --tgheretford (talk) 11:43, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
::Thanks Tghe-retford, for that extraordinary informative reply. My major concern is for the sometimes long lists of past and present presenters, often with items of biograpgical information. IMO that would fall quite strictly under WP:BLP and should be removed if not verifiably sourced. What would be your recommendation on that? Note that I always personally warn all major contributors before I carry out any radical editing, or before I PROD or AfD.--Kudpung (talk) 11:59, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
:::Agreed. It's something that I have been working on with 102.2 Jazz FM on my sandbox although work on that has stalled (having a girlfriend - well, now ex-girlfriend didn't help) and I have added a good number of them to the Jazz FM (UK)#Presenters and Shows article, even though there is still room for improvement. Also worth noting that I have tried to make that information reference, informative without sliding to the temptation of adding a station schedule to the article. Pretty difficult to do though, because specific third party references (which are needed to establish inclusion) for presenters and shows are thin on the ground, but I would agree entirely that presenters need to be referenced on pages to prevent potential biographies of living persons violations, and violations should be dealt with as per policy. --tgheretford (talk) 12:07, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
::::Thanks again for your help. It will probably be the presenter sections that will be first to get the chop then. After of course a polite message on all the contributors talk pages that they can do something about it if they act quickly. It will also serve as a warning as to what may happen to rest of the unsourced items on the articles.--Kudpung (talk) 12:18, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
