Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cooper Brown

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 delete. Ad Orientem (talk) 00:48, 20 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cooper Brown

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Normally I'd WP:PROD this, but given the ridiculously earnest discussions on the talk page this has the potential to be contentious. Cooper Brown was a joke feature that ran intermittently as filler for a couple of years in The Independent. (This was a fairly typical example; we're not talking deathless prose here.) I can find no indication that anyone other than Wikipedia has ever even mentioned the topic (the 'references' are dead links to the parody website for the subject), and since The Independent ceased publishing three years ago (the website that now uses the name has almost nothing in common with the print newspaper it nominally succeeded), I imagine it's safe to assume there will never be anything further written by or about the subject. ‑ Iridescent 17:10, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(adding) A bit more digging shows a couple of passing mentions in interviews with Dom Joly (who wrote it), and a couple of sentences in Joly's autobiography, but these obviously don't constitute independent third party non-trivial coverage. ‑ Iridescent 17:28, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom. Beat me to the nomination, by a few minutes:-) ∯WBG^converse 17:18, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. There's no "there" there. Kablammo (talk) 17:22, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete No secondary, independent coverage of the subject [1], illustrated by the paucity—facebook, primary, and just lowgrade—of the existing sources. @Iridescent:...and of course fails WP:ANYBIO, eh ;) ——SerialNumber54129 17:29, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Serial Number 54129, if there's an argument to be made it would be that it's a work by a notable subject and consequently inherits Dom Joly's notability, in the same way that we have an article on Cows in the Meadow even though virtually nothing has been written specifically about it. With all due respect, I personally don't feel that a guy whose act consisted of holding a giant phone is in the Van Gogh/Lennon/Dickens bracket of being so notable that all his works are inherently notable. ‑ Iridescent 17:38, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Not enough notable coverage to be on Wikipedia. Couldn't find any secondary sources. Justwatchmee (talk) 17:37, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Dom Joly, where it is not currently mentioned. Johnbod (talk) 18:39, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- It is, in fact, mentioned in the Dom Joly article (He was alleged to be the writer of a spoof column in The Independent and then "i" called "Cooper Brown: He's out there."). No value in a merge. Risker (talk) 19:30, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - What do you mean "No value in a merge" - the Cooper Brown character has had an article for over 10 years & got 900 views last year, and you don't want any detail on it at all? That is just wierd. Johnbod (talk) 00:59, 13 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - There's nothing in the Cooper Brown article that would not represent undue weight in the Dom Joly article. This was hardly Joly's most prominent reason for notability; almost all of the rest of his writings are more notable than this. Further, it is mentioned already in the Joly article, with its own paragraph, leading off the "writings" subsection. The current Brown article is only six sentences, two of which refer to specific columns, one of which says the fake personality made a facebook page post. That's not really merge-worthy material. Redirect would be fine, but I see no point in merging. Risker (talk) 01:50, 13 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      - Well for a start the bio only says he is the "alleged" author, lacking the confirmation ref that Iri has found above. Johnbod (talk) 02:30, 13 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Doesn't meet any version of notability. Risker (talk) 19:30, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 02:12, 13 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Journalism-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 02:12, 13 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment, is there a problem with turning this into a redirect to Career#Dom Joly as this could come up as a wikireader search term? Coolabahapple (talk) 02:23, 13 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- There's probably nothing wrong with redirecting it to Dom Joly#Career. This could be done after deleting the previous content, if wanted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:47, 14 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete 900 views a year is some combination of web crawlers and lost people looking for information on a fairly common name and coming here because Wikipedia gets great search engine rankings. I doubt many readers are looking for this page. Legacypac (talk) 11:11, 15 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per me. Lourdes 03:22, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the above comments. Aoba47 (talk) 16:11, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A revealing debate Would any of the deleters care to share their reasons for not following normal WP practice and at least redirecting to the article where, as pointed out above, it is already covered? Johnbod (talk) 16:35, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't have an issue with redirecting to Dom Joly if someone really feels it worthwhile. I find it unlikely that anyone would find such a redirect useful—I can't imagine anyone searching for this other than fans of Joly's, who would expect to find this at the parent article rather than on a content fork anyway—but redirects are cheap. As Legacypac (almost) says, an average of three pageviews per day is going to be almost exclusively background noise generated by misclicks, searching for similar-sounding topics and people clicking the existing link on Dom Joly; I very much doubt anyone is actually not only thinking "hey, I want to find out about a decade-old spoof column in a defunct newspaper", but remembering the name in order to search for it in the first place. Ironically, the main argument for keeping the history is probably to preserve the lunacy on the talk page in case it needs to be used as future evidence should the user in question submit an unblock request. ‑ Iridescent 19:45, 18 February 2019 (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.