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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Generation Jones (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 keep. - Philippe 20:13, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Generation Jones

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AfDs for this article:
Generation Jones (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

This is an article with one primary contributor who has inserted dozens of sources which all reference books or radio and television appearances by the same person. This article therefore appears to be well sourced, but in reality it is being used to promote one person's usage of this term and isn't necessarily notable, despite how often Mr. Pontell has used it in the media. There are no other third party sources which confirm the usage of this term other than Mr. Pontell, which indicates that this article fails NPOV. Cumulus Clouds (talk) 18:17, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]


  • Delete - I believe this entry should be deleted or, at most, folded into an unsupported alternative view of the "Post-World War II baby boom" entry since there is absolutely no data to support its separation from said entry. Any effort to support the central argument that "protests over civil rights and the Vietnam war and the emergence of rock music" did not directly shape those born from the years 1954-1965 would be purely subjective, and is, in this 1964-born writer's opinion, completely ludicrous. Additionally, those US males born in 1954 would have been subject to the Vietnam War draft lottery had it continued past 1972, and those born in 1955 would still have been subject to the US military draft. Men born in those years were extremely concerned about the possibility of becoming drafted. Those facts are in themselves enough to disprove the central argument of the entry. The entry smacks of self-promotion in the coining of a term for monetary and/or status gain alone. vermouth22 (talk) Jul. 02, 21:26:52 UTC —Preceding comment was added at 21:27, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The above description of this article is blatantly innacurate. If you google "Generation Jones", you'll find hundreds of thousands of references to it (I just did, with 251,000 results). I just went through a bunch of them, and hardly any of them are of Pontell using the term. At least 90% of these references are third parties using the term Generation Jones. Among the third parties which I just found using this term are the magazines USNews and World Report and Newsweek, the newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post (four seperate articles in The WP), and the TV networks NBC and CBS. These are just a small fraction of the thousands of media outlets that regularly use this term...all third parties, completely unconnected to Pontell (and the Wikipedia article is obviously the result of multiple contributors). Given the large, and increasing, interest and usage of this term, it should clearly not be deleted, but rather expanded.```` —Preceding unsigned comment added by CurrentHistoryMatters (talk • contribs) 22:12, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • This article is the result of two editors, of which you are one and other is User:21st century Susan, whose only contributions are to that article. This is usually a dead giveaway for sockpuppetry or a conflict of interest, so I would caution any other editors against taking the "large interest" argument into account. Cumulus Clouds (talk) 00:56, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • yet another blatantly incorrect piece of info from you, cumulus clouds...I just looked again at this article, and it clearly is the result of multiple editors. And where do you come off making accuasations of sockpuppetry? It seems to me that the bigger question here is what is your personal agenda against this? You seem to have little interest in the truth, and in what is right for Wikipedia, and instead seem focused on unwarranted attacks for personal reasons. Those of us who care about the Generation Jones movement (and there are many of us across the U.S.) are used to baseless attacks from those who have an agenda against this. There is a large Baby Boomer industry,for example, and as the Generation Jones movement gets increasingly widespread, it undermines those who have put out a shingle as a "Boomer expert". One who writes a book which claims expertise about Boomers, and uses the old (and increasingly obsolete) 1946-1964 definition of Boomers, is understandably not happy as that book becomes irrelevant. Is that what is beyond these baseless claims from you, cumulus clouds? Your behavior here does seem very suspicious. You claim to have done extensive research on this, and then say that "There are no other third party sources which confirm the usage of this term other than Mr. Pontell". If you actually had done even a small amount of research, you'd know that thousands of third party sources use the term Generation Jones. You ignore the comments of me and others who point out that what's relevant here is that Generation Jones is clearly notable, regardless of how it got that way. Frankly, the fact that you even nominated this article for deletion is quite telling in its own right: you may disagree with this concept or some aspects of it, but to suggest that this topic doesn't even warrent an article in Wikipedia is ridiculous. You haven't advanced any basis whatsoever for why this article should be deleted. You warn other editors "against taking the "large interest" argument into account" because of your conclusion that only a couple people have written this article. Even if this conclusion was correct (which it isn't), what does that have to do with the "large interest"?! You would have us ignore the 250,000 hits on Google for this term because you think only a couple people wrote this article. So the way we should determine whether a term is notable and should have an article on Wikipedia should not be based on widespread usage by major media, high-level politicians, etc., but instead should be based on how many people wrote a Wikipedia article?! I don't know what your agenda is, but it clearly isn't to improve Wikipedia with this disingenuous attempt to pretend that this term isn't notable.```` —Preceding unsigned comment added by CurrentHistoryMatters (talk • contribs)
  • Keep. The large number of sources mentioning the term prove that it is notable, at least as a media concept, whether or not such a generation actually 'exists'. The fact that many or most of the references relate to a single person, Jonathan Pontell, does not make the subject non-notable. It may well be that all those mentions in the media (as well as this article itself) are the results of a highly successful self-promotion campaign by Mr. Pontell; but even so, that they exist means that the 'Generation Jones' concept has become notable and deserves our coverage. We should not be concerned with how a pop culture term becomes notable; only whether it is or isn't, and this term, as far as I can tell, clearly is.
As an aside, I personally have not heard of this term before encountering this article. However, having read it, I find it fully meets our inclusion criteria (WP:NOTE, WP:RS). I see nothing in the nomination that can be considered a valid reason for deletion. Terraxos (talk) 22:20, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep-Not all the references are pertinent, but enough of them are to mean something. The page needs to be cleaned up and pertinent references kept, most references need to be scraped.PB666 yap 01:41, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yea, but once again, all those articles only quote Jon Pontell. The number of times its mentioned in popular culture is irrelevant, since usage is not useful encyclopedic information. At the end of the day, this is an article aiding a PR campaign being waged by one guy to sell more copies of his book. Cumulus Clouds (talk) 06:37, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The editor(s) should strive to get rid of many of the references and work finding at least one other reference independently using the terminology. But it is still a keep.PB666 yap 15:41, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • cumulus clouds, I sincerely wonder whether your insistence on repeating blatantly incorrect information over and over is deliberate dishonesty, or comes from genuine ignorance. You've written several times over the last couple days that media references to this term are all connected to Pontell. If you spent a few minutes googling the term, you'd find that the vast majority of these third party references don't mention Pontell at all, they just use the term Generation Jones generically to describe this age group. You'd also find that many credible people and organizations (from Prime Ministers to Fortune 500 Companies) use the term, again with no reference to Pontell. Or you could look at blogs and groups and see many lengthy and enthusiastic discussions about Generation Jones, again unconnected to Pontell. But instead you choose to ignore these truths, and keep repeating your false claim over and over. Is it that you think if you repeat a falsehood enough times that you can make it true in an Orwellian way? Is it that you enjoy being malicious and abusing the spirit of Wikipedia? I took a look at your other activities here, and see that you frequently get into confrontations with people, obsess over whether people are sockpuppets, etc. Even when there is sockpuppetry in an article, that doesn't change the notability of a topic! You are the kind of person who hurts the good name of Wikipedia, and should be ashamed of yourself nominating topics like this for deletion with no basis whatsoever. Wikipedia is such an important resource for us all, and it is so undermined by this kind of behavior.```` —Preceding unsigned comment added by CurrentHistoryMatters (talk • contribs) 17:08, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yea right. In my experience newly registered users who create single articles about unique or fringe subjects and then spend the rest of their time here editing that article or defending against deletion probably have some real world investment in retaining the information here. I frequently engage in these discussions because self-promotion on Wikipedia is something that I think harms the fundamental nature of this encyclopedia. I've also found that sockpuppets or COIs typically run me into the ground for destroying Wikipedia or being deliberately false or malicious. Given that your reaction meets the typical MO for a COI, I'd say I was right on the money here. Cumulus Clouds (talk) 17:22, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Seem to be plenty of mentions in reliable sources to establish notability. AndyJones (talk) 16:45, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Many third party reliable and independent sources have used and discussed the term, independently of appearances or speeches or writings of Pontell. Also the claim that the article is "the result of two editors" is false, per the history [1].A Google News search "generation jones" -boomj[2] (with press releases from a social networking site BOOMJ excluded) shows 238 possible refs which could be used to improve the article. (Some are coincidental juxtapositions of the words, but many are clearly about Pontell's coinage.) But see CNN [3] for an example of the substantial coverage of this 53,000,000 strong (U.S.) demographic group. See also Telegraph.co.uk [4] and Timesonline.co.uk [5] which said the term's "electoral influence" gives it "staying power" to demonstrate its coverage in other English speaking countries. Clearly Pontell's coinage is not as commonly used as generation X (29,600 cites[6])or Baby Boomer (55,500 cites[7]) but the term has enough use in the mainstream news media, with in depth discussion rather than passing mention, to justify an article. The fact that the articles credit the coiner of the term with coining the term in no way takes away the notability due to the coverage. As for the false claim of the article having one or two editors, that would be a good reason for others to edit it. If it is too positive, then add criticism of the term from the sources. Edison (talk) 18:24, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per previous 5 keeps. I concur that one person here is likely a sockpuppet, but this isn't the place for such accusations. — BQZip01 — talk 06:26, 4 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to either Baby Boomer or Generation X. Squidfryerchef (talk) 15:40, 5 July 2008 (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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