Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mix FM (Ottawa)

:{{la|Mix FM (Ottawa)}} – (View AfDView log)

:({{Find sources|Mix FM (Ottawa)}})

Procedural nomination; this is a bit of a tricky situation here, so I thought it best to bring it here to discuss how we handle the matter. The issue is that back in 2009, a teenager in Ottawa ran a pirate radio station for a few weeks before getting shut down. The incident received a flurry of press coverage at the time, so an article was written, although it did face some concerns as to whether editors were committing that classic fallacy of confusing news coverage with genuine and lasting notability (see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/CKLI-FM). Now, however, the kid is actually in criminal trial for some of his behaviour at the time — and under Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act, even media that covered the pirate radio story last year are no longer allowed to identify him by name and the articles we used as sources last year have mostly had to be taken offline.

Now, I know that strictly speaking Wikipedia isn't bound by the letter of Canadian law. However, we do have a principle of respecting local law whenever reasonably possible, WP:BLPNAME does allow us to redact names in cases where "public interest" doesn't clearly outweigh the privacy rights of a person who isn't really a public figure, we've lost most of our viable sources, simply taking his name out of the article but otherwise keeping the content about the station itself would require us to completely delete the old version and start over again from scratch without those dead sources, and now that over a year has passed since the original incident I have a much stronger feeling that it can never really be anything more than a WP:BLP1E. It's just a passing news story about a kid who did something a bit (or a lot) stupid, but never really had any documentable long-term impact on anything — and I'm not sure I see the value in keeping it for trivial posterity that doesn't really serve a genuinely encyclopedic purpose. Procedural nomination, no !vote. Bearcat (talk) 02:02, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

• Delete - If the article cannot be written with in-depth details, then it cannot be maintained in Wikipedia, because it does not fit the principle of what it takes to be an encyclopedia. Eduemoni^↑talk↓ 02:16, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
• Delete This is a tough one; on one hand the station caused plenty of havoc when it was on the air, but on the other it was only on the air for two-three months and hasn't even been on the air except for intermittent UStreaming since then, and because of the age of the subject there has to be a respect of Canadian law in identifying the subject. However based solely on the time period of notability I'm more inclined to delete based on lack of lasting notability a year later rather than on the trial itself. Nate • (chatter) 04:29, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

:As a point of law, we do not have to respect Canadian law on the matter of identification. Wikimedia projects are governed under US law (Florida, in fact), and we have the First Amendment. Notability is not temporary, if he was notable, then he remains notable, even if there exists a censorship law which has removed references available online, sources do not have to be online if they exist on microfilm somewhere in a newspaper archive. I can't pass judgement on the actual notability but I felt it important to point out. HominidMachinae (talk) 08:49, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

::We're not obligated to respect Canadian law, no; I acknowledged that right up front. But we do have a principle that we should respect non-US law if there isn't a compelling public interest to be served by flouting it — for instance, if the government of Japan were trying to censor what the media can report about Fukushima, there'd be a compelling reason to disregard their law: people could die if we didn't. But in this case, the most compelling reason to disregard Canadian law is "because we can" — and that's just not that compelling, because it isn't serving any public interest besides cheap voyeurism. And while it's true that notability isn't temporary, it's also true that when a news story is fresh and current we can be deceived into thinking it has more notability than it really does. So for some articles it is necessary to revisit them a year or two later to re-evaluate whether they're really as notable as we thought at the time. Bearcat (talk) 17:54, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

:::BLP1E and NOTNEWS are the reasons I reserved judgement on the article itself, I see points both ways HominidMachinae (talk) 02:37, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

The article could be redone if need be without his name, however I think this is more than just a trivial article. There were legitimate concerns raised and also the history of radio stations is important. Alebowgm (talk) 12:22, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

:Note: This debate has been included in the list of Radio-related deletion discussions. —• Gene93k (talk) 00:48, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

:Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:49, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

• Keep - with the latest court case, this subject has gone well beyond BLP1E/NOTNEWS and the story (and its notability) obviously isn't going away. The drawn-out nature of this situation has made this an unusual milestone in Canadian pirate radio, and speculation that the notability is going to disappear fails WP:CRYSTAL, As for the supposed loss of sources, current stories on the case can legally (in Canadian terms) reference much of the station history without specifically identifying the party involved; in any case, offline sources have traditionally not been considered a show-stopper per WP:SOURCEACCESS (WP:V). Also consider Wikipedia:General disclaimer#Jurisdiction and legality of content. Deletion is an excessive (non-)solution to a solvable problem here, though we may have to tread a bit carefully with the content. Dl2000 (talk) 04:16, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
• Keep because it appears to have non-temporary notability because of the rare strong enforcement of Canadian unlicensed radio law. (I am not an expert in Canadian radio law, so if this is actually more common than I make it sound like, feel free to mention it.) In spite of Canadan laws about minors, the number of sources here seems to meet WP:GNG to me; I don't know how many are blogs, but I see a several mainstream WP:RS: about 6 (1 not yet recovered in archives) Ottawa Citizen after disregarding duplicate refs to the same articles; 1 CBC News; 1 CTV News. For those that consider Quebecor Media a reliable source, we also have 1 "QMI" Agency via canoe.ca; 1 London Free Press; and 1 for the tabloid Ottawa Sun. If it turns out to be trivial in retrospect, it can be nominated again later. But one has to determine it now one way or the other based on what we already know. From what little I know of Canadian radio history, this seems to have already passed a threshold that will make it notable in future long-term coverage of Canadian radio, rather than depending on likely future events (i.e. WP:CRYSTAL) --Closeapple (talk) 10:30, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
• Comment in addition to my keep vote above: If suppressing sources (that name the child) would cause the article to dip below WP:V threshold for notability, then the sources should be left in, at least to the extent necessary to meet the same Wikipedia guidelines the article would have met otherwise. The same goes for any other local speech laws that end up having a domino effect on applying Wikipedia guidelines. It is one thing to give courtesy deference to local privacy laws in an article about that place, when it doesn't endanger content's ability to meet Wikipedia guidelines; it is another, and quite unacceptable, to allow local laws to insert alterations in the application of Wikipedia policy (WP:Verifiability/WP:Reliable sources/WP:Notability) to its own content, and as a result, for example, effect the deletion of the subject itself from Wikipedia when it would not have happened otherwise. In short: Canadian law should not be allowed to push a Wikipedia article into failing WP:GNG or any other Wikipedia policy. --Closeapple (talk) 10:30, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

:Note: This debate has been included in the list of Crime-related deletion discussions. -- Closeapple (talk) 11:53, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

• Keep - per user Dl2000 good reasoning.--BabbaQ (talk) 14:51, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
• Keep - per above. We already have all the sources, and if they can't be attained online, there's always Google, archive.org and microfilm. And considering the fact that Wikipedia is US-based on US servers, Canadian law should not overreach their borders. -- azumanga (talk) 16:42, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

: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.