Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/College Football Data Warehouse

College Football Data Warehouse

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Fails WP:GNG. Citations show no significant coverage of this defunct website. Reliable sources sometimes use the site's data: "According to the College Football Data Warehouse...". But I cannot find any sources that offer WP:SIGCOV of the website itself. PK-WIKI (talk) 21:05, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. This was one of the largest and most reliable sources of statistical information on the history of college football (and it remains accessible through the Internet Archives). Major news outlets long relied on it as a "go to" source for historical information on the sport. E.g., Chicago Tribune (reviewing CFDW's findings on the use of interim head coaches), The Montgomery Advertiser (dscussing CFDW's use of the National Championship Foundation to reconstruct history and choose national champions); The New York Times, USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Cleveland Plain Dealer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Vancouver Sun, The Orlando Sentinel. As set forth in the article, CFDW has also been widely cited in books on college football history and in scholarly journals. Further, a review at Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Reliable sources confirmed: "Not only has this website has proven time and again to be a reliable source of information, but it is maintained by an established expert on the topic and is relevant to the field." Given how widely cited the database is, it would do a disservice to Wikipedia to delete the information that has been developed about its background, its creators, and its unfortunate demise. Cbl62 (talk) 21:52, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Those citations provide barely any coverage of the website, let alone significant coverage.
These are the complete mentions of CFDW in those sources:
The only information that can be gleaned from any of those sources comes from the New York Times piece: that CFDW is a "website" and that David DeLassus is a proprietor.

WP:SIGCOV states "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.

These are all trivial mentions at best. PK-WIKI (talk) 04:41, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sports-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 21:57, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of American football-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 21:57, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Websites-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 21:57, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 21:58, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: The sources provided by cbl62 appear to contain the necessary WP:SIGCOV of the website to meet the WP:GNG. Let'srun (talk) 03:56, 20 April 2025 (UTC) [reply]
Where are you seeing WP:SIGCOV in those sources? The citations only say that "College Football Data Warehouse" was used as a source for each article. They contain basically no details at all about CFDW itself. PK-WIKI (talk) 04:45, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

CFDW is a major information repository/resource. It has not only been cited regularly as a reliable source by major media outlets, scholarly journals, and books; it is also cited as a source in hundreds (thousands?) of Wikipedia articles and is recognized here as a reliable source. Deleting the article, which provides background information and context on the database, simply does not improve Wikipedia. I don't recall ever relying on WP:IAR in 18 years working on Wikipedia, but this is a case where it definitely applies: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." Cbl62 (talk) 10:01, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep The fact that the subject has been widely cited in books on college football history and in scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Sports Economics, the Utah Law Review, the Tulsa Law Review, the Oklahoma Law Review, and Sports Law, is proof of notability. The points made by Cbl62, all of which are valid, also favor keeping the article. In addition, this article is a valuable source of information, which if lost would be detrimental to Wikipedia. Jeff in CA (talk) 10:03, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Projectify We have several keep votes already here, but PK-WIKI's central point remains unchallenged: there has been no substantial coverage of the College Football Data Warehouse itself to establish it as a notable subject. Its use as a source in books, newspapers, and journals and establishes it a reliable source (at least in the past), but not clearly as a notable subject. Compare, for example, with Baseball Reference, which was the subject of a 2015 article in Rolling Stone (here). We having nothing of that sort for CFDW. I also have my doubts that CFWD remains a quality tertiary source now that it is defunct and has not been updated in several years, and therefore does not reflect any of the error-checking and de-bugging against primary and secondary sources that we editors have performed here in editing Wikipedia in recent years. In the early to mid 2010s, I sent David DeLassus over 100 emails regarding errors I found on his website, and he made corrections accordingly. But that obviously stopped once the site went effectively defunct nearly a decade ago. To that point, I have been removing references to CFDW wherever they are redundant or can be replaced with other suitable sources. I plan to eventually remove all the references to CFDW, if possible. But given CFDW's history as a reliable source and frequent citation here on Wikipedia, I think this article should be preserved in some form. A WikiProject College football project page seems like the best fit. Jweiss11 (talk) 14:49, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with moving it to the internal Wikipedia:WikiProject College football space. That page would be far more useful than the current article, as we could discuss the history/authorship/reliability/sourcing issues you mention that are inappropriate for mainspace. PK-WIKI (talk) 16:50, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with the suggesstion from Jweiss11. Let'srun (talk) 02:36, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Any further comment regarding moving to projectspace?
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, asilvering (talk) 11:52, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep as incredibly widely cited media outlet. It’s well established that media doesn’t cover other media in the same way it covers the subjects themselves. WilsonP NYC (talk) 22:43, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WilsonP makes an incredibly good point. And very few media outlets have such a long history of being cited as a reliable source to the extent we see here with CFDW being cited in the most reputable newspapers in America in addition to books and academic journals. Cbl62 (talk) 05:40, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Response Among the Wikipedia articles on college football, for the past several years, mentions of and citations to CFDW have (for reasons not related to WP:GNG or WP:SIGCOV) been removed from articles and lists by:
- replacing, within a table, a column that relied on CFDW for inclusion criteria,
- deleting from another article the very same table that appears in this subject article,
- deleting a section about CFDW,
- (per a statement by one of the respected editors above) removing references to CFDW, with a mission to eventually remove all references to CFDW from Wikipedia.

For some of these removals, I began a discussion to object to and resolve the disagreements, and in the end, I relented based on good faith considerations. However, the pursuit to remove CFDW wherever it is mentioned is beginning to seem like a targeted effort to inflict upon CFDW a "death by a thousand cuts", and I am growing weary in general, not to mention becoming older by the day. And I mean no disrespect of any other editors.

Perhaps there is an effort to eradicate all mention of CFDW from Wikipedia; I don't know. I will predict that, if this article is moved to Wikiproject space, then in relatively short time, someone (in disregard of the level of project activity and collaboration it might receive) will say, "The project never really got off the ground," and nominate it for MFD. That could well be a nail in the coffin of CFDW on Wikipedia, and people will celebrate that Wikipedia policies prevailed and therefore that CFDW suffered a deserved fate.

Therefore, I agree with Cbl62 that, if ever there was a reason for implementing WP:IAR to keep an article, this is it. Jeff in CA (talk) 20:38, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As an answer to that, from my perspective CFDW was extremely over-represented (to the point of clearly violating WP:NPOV / WP:WEIGHT) in the articles you mention. This probably comes from being one of the top college football websites available in the years immediately following the founding of Wikipedia. I am rather critical of their opinion on "recognized national champions" (as are you?) and I believe per our evolved adherence to NPOV it was right to remove them from the Wikipedia articles you mention.

CFDW is/was perhaps a reliable source on records and statistical data (although I do have my doubts due to it being WP:SELFPUBLISHED). My issue with using it for this, though, is that the authors of CFDW do not cite any sources for their information. They were surely just drawing it from athletic department publications and newspaper clippings, which is exactly what we now do here at Wikipedia. This was obviously MUCH harder in the time of microfilm and the early days of the internet, so I commend them for their research. But today, in the age of Newspapers.com and other great archives of contemporary reporting, I would rather just mostly skip the step of citing a random self-published website that has been offline for a decade and that may contain forever-uncorrected errors.

I myself have absolutely no intention of deleting a CFDW page in the CFB wikiproject space. I would probably be one of the primary authors. I would have expanded the mainspace article, but unfortunately there appears to be zero significant coverage ever written about the website. If either of the authors are shown to be notable or published, I will consider writing an article on them. PK-WIKI (talk) 01:35, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't find Jeff in CA's suggestion that if we projectify the CFDW article, it will soon be MfD'd to be credible. We have lots of project pages that have been around for years, including several that I created (like Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Coaching trees, Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Official college football guides, Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Archived yearbooks, Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Media guide errors). I don't recall any of these every being MfD'd. If someone were to MfD a projectified CFWD article, you can count on my keep vote there. Jweiss11 (talk) 07:14, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Still no consensus on whether to move to projectspace or keep.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Toadspike [Talk] 14:39, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Delete or Projectify, there just isn't enough significant coverage to get us over the line... The USEDBYOTHERS argument is a weak one and overall does not surmount the lack of serious in depth coverage of the topic. The argument that the page not existing will affect its use as a source is a curious one but appears spurious and even if it were true would have no bearing on a deletion discussion. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:59, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]