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General comments

Wow!! Thanks for all your hard work on this, it's sure to be useful. I'm really happy with it as is, but since you've asked for feedback, I'll try to throw out a few ideas. I'm trying to be as constructive as possible, so please don't take any of the above below as criticism of your work. You deserve many thanks! -Tobogganoggin talk 00:52, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I asked for criticism; I want criticism. Further, some of my suggestions here are at variance with decisions I've made in the articles I myself have edited. Thanks for the feedback. I'll respond to each point individually, and I invite other editors to be bold and do so as well (and come up with their own criticisms to post on this page). At some point, maybe a week out, or whenever I feel consensus has been achieved, I'll make changes to the guideline itself. Wiki Wistah 02:20, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Notability

No arguments from me on the criteria, but maybe the presentation could be improved if they were spilt into two subsections, one listing notability criteria, and the other non-notable exclusion criteria. Just a thought, I'm not sure if this would really be an improvement or not. -Tobogganoggin talk 00:52, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

  • Weekly newspaper companies are notable, with the same restrictions as daily companies.
  • Weekly newspapers generally are not notable, but should be listed (with a paragraph of explanation, if possible) on the article about their parent company. But:
    • Weeklies that are the only paper published by their owner are notable and should get a Wikipedia article in lieu of an article on the owning company.
    • Weeklies that meet Wikipedia's standards of notability for readers outside their circulation areas (e.g., a weekly embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that receives regional coverage) are notable.
    • Weeklies that are the only print medium in their region are notable.
    • Other weeklies may be notable depending on the degree to which they represent a significant source of hard news in a large community. The article should show that this is the case.

I would argue that weeklies are notable in that they usually have a long history within their communities. I think the notability should come down to rather they are community newsletters (not notable) vs. hard community news (notable). Even though many are now corporately owned or have parent companies which are notable, many were independant at their starts however... just my two cents. jtowns 17:45, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree that it's difficult where to draw the line with weeklies. The last bulleted item you quote is my attempt to introduce some wiggle room to the standard. The question is, where does one draw the line? I'm a weekly newspaper editor myself, working for a corporation that owns several newspapers that were originally independent and (in many cases) are still "papers of record" for their small towns. These papers sometimes blur the line between "community newspaper" and "hard community news." It's easy to say that all dailies are notable (it oughta be ... I said it), and it's easy to say that shoppers are not, except for whatever notability their parent company might have (see Harte-Hanks, for example). But to take a couple examples from my own editing corpus, look at Hathaway Publishing and East Bay Newspapers. Sure, the paragraph treatment given to each weekly could be expanded -- but by how much? For any of these, I'd say going much beyond four sentences would be overkill and unencylopedic. Wiki Wistah 21:33, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
So maybe we go by circulation. Usually if a weekly has a large enough circulation it would therefore be notable. I'm thinking like a 15, 20, or 30,000 print copies per week threshold to the point that it is more than just a newsletter and maybe notable. Just a different thought... jtowns 07:01, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Naming

A few cases exist where a newspaper is disambiguated with "(newspaper)" instead of the community name. In such cases, there is probably not another newspaper with the same title, but simply some other media or article subject. I certainly think your guideline (community name) is best, but perhaps it would be helpful to mention the other case as a practice to be avoided. -Tobogganoggin talk 00:52, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Definitely should be mentioned, IMO, as a secondary option for disambig, but not as a forbidden option. An example is The Phoenix (newspaper), where disambig by town name would problematic because it's an alt weekly that publishes similar editions in several New England cities. Wiki Wistah 02:20, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Infobox

Having added and edited many infoboxes myself, I may not have the most impartial opinion on this, but my practice has been to present the headquarters as it would appear in a postal address, including abbreviating the state or province name. I don't disagree with you here, I'm just pointing out that most instances would need to be changed accordingly. Also, I've adopted the practice of adding a country flag template below the address, as in  Australia ({{AUS}}),  Canada ({{CAN}}),  England ({{ENG}}), or  United States ({{USA}}), just to name a few common examples. I think this is a good way to give a quick heads up to readers so that they can determine whether or not the article is the one they actually expected to be reading. For consistent aesthetic reasons, I'd also propose standardizing the maximum image sizes as 225px for masthead logos and 175px for front page scans. I think smaller images should not be enlarged, as doing so often reduces quality. -Tobogganoggin talk 00:52, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm with you on the image sizes. That should be specified, and I like the specifications you offer. I also like the flag template idea. As for the postal abbreviations -- this is one of my little pet peeves. If you try to send mail to "Boston, Massachusetts 02133", it'll get there just as surely as "Boston, MA 02133" -- and non-postal workers from states that don't begin with "M" will be able to read the envelope properly, too. Perhaps some folks are using these infoboxes to figure out where to send a letter to the editor (although it bears noting that several newspapers prefer that you send correspondence to their P.O. boxes, not their street address, and we never put P.O. boxes in infoboxes) ... but I think the main use of this datum is so people can see what city the physical offices are in, and perhaps what neighborhood. Spelling everything out makes it clearer for those of us not from the immediate area. I would also point out that the Wikipedia policy WP:ABB deprecates those two-letter abbreviations for precisely this reason.
Sound reasoning. My state abbreviating was based purely on form, but you've made a good case that here it's trumped by function. -Tobogganoggin talk 00:14, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Body text

Should historic alternate names not in recent use be bolded in addition to being italicized? Your guideline seems to differ from the response to my question here on this point. Your text reads "If a newspaper is still (or was until recently) known by a another name..." I'm not quibbling, just looking for clarification on your intent here. -Tobogganoggin talk 00:52, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

The problem with bolding everything is that you end up with this -- a ton of bold clutter because the newspaper's changed its name four or five times in the last 20 years. I think this is a place where editors have to use discretion and their own sense of style. My point in this guideline, and perhaps it can be stated better, is that the editor should boldface every name by which the paper is known; but if The New York Times long ago stopped calling itself The New-York Daily Times, I don't see the point in cluttering the page with that. Save it for the history section, and run it in regular italic. Wiki Wistah 02:20, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
Sounds like a good balance to me. I suppose that in a few cases, subscribers are stubborn, and refer to their papers by outdated names, but those instances would be self-evident to most editors working on the relevant articles. I guess my thinking was in part that a quick glance would make it clear to readers redirected from historic names that they've found the right article. But this would certainly be only a tiny fraction of all readers, and you're right about the unecessary clutter. I should really be giving those readers more credit, anyway - if they weren't prepared to read, they wouldn't have come to Wikipedia! -Tobogganoggin talk 00:14, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Not really responding to anything of yours here, but I wanted to toss this one out ... the "body copy" section should also encourage the editor to provide "External links" and "References", preferably footnote-style. Wiki Wistah 23:43, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Categories

The following comments are admittedly U.S.-centric. Please excuse my ignorance here. This section will likely be a challenge, as it's hard to write universally applicable guidelines that apply to all specific cases. However, here are a few points:

Agreed re: state-newspaper-stubs like California's. Not sure what the use is of "Southern US Newspaper Stubs" -- what makes the South so special? Or are there stubs of this sort for every census division? ... but willing to go along if there's a good reason for that stub existing.
The guideline text ought to be changed to reflect the next point you make: Every paper should be categorized into "Newspapers Published in _STATE_" unless they belong to a subcategory -- e.g. "Newspapers published in Los Angeles" instead of "... in California", "... in Chicago" instead of "... in Illinois", etc. Additionally, every paper should be categorized in "_COUNTY_, _STATE_" unless it fits more accurately in a subcategory -- e.g. the Los Angeles subcategory of L.A. County, or the Chicago subcategory of Cook County. Good points -- this is mandated by the WP policy of not listing a page in both a category and one of its subcategories.
Your caveat at the start of this section raises another point -- the guideline as written is U.S.-centric and needs to be rephrased. I'll have to do some field research to figure out what categories exist for U.K., Canadian, Austrialian, European and other newspapers ... does the fun ever stop? Wiki Wistah 02:20, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
RE:stub types, I hunted around and found this archived discussion of the newspaper subcats. It appears that some individual state stub types were created, but all those for the Southern U.S. states group the pages on which they're placed into a single stub category (Southern United States newspaper stubs). It's not really clear why this was done only for the South and California, but the discussion suggests it was due to the number of articles that would qualify. It also looks like the individual stub types were created to be "in reserve" with an eye towards eventually having a different stub cat for each U.S. state. I'm not at all familiar with stub sorting, but I'll look into dividing these up for all 50 states. -Tobogganoggin talk 00:14, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Some thoughts

I just copied the notability, its easier if I respond point by point, each comment is signed for easier ID.

And I'll respond to each point as it occurs. To answer your closing comment -- of course this isn't too harsh. On the contrary, I'm glad you took the time to offer your thoughts. As I say above, I asked for frank comments. My ego doesn't bruise this easily :). Wiki Wistah 03:30, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Before adding any article to Wikipedia, an editor should ask: Is this notable? In the case of newspapers:

  • Daily newspaper companies are notable for inclusion in Wikipedia, each with individual articles, except companies whose decisionmaking apparatus consists entirely of personnel from one particular newspaper, or one particular other company.
I can definitely reword this. Someone above suggested that the entire structure of this guideline be replaced by something more easily intelligible, and I agree with that. Wiki Wistah 03:30, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Daily newspapers are notable for inclusion in Wikipedia, each with individual articles.
  • Daily newspaper editions are not notable. If a newspaper publishes slightly different content in different adjoining neighborhoods, or publishes a slightly different afternoon or late-morning edition, note it in the newspaper's article, not in a separate article.
  • Sunday newspapers, even if they have a different name, are not notable and should be mentioned in the "parent" daily newspaper's article. Sunday newspapers not associated with daily newspapers are weeklies; see below.
  • Magazine inserts generally are not notable and should be mentioned in the parent newspaper's article. Exception: national inserts such as USA Weekend.
  • Joint operating agreements and other consortia or associations between newspapers are generally not notable, but may be detailed in individual newspapers' articles.
It is jargon, but the special case of JOAs (and, now that I think about it, syndicates and wires, too) has to be dealt with, I felt, and any attempt to explain it or work around it in a non-jargon way would either introduce more jargon or turn this section of the guideline into a newspaper manager's glossary. My way of looking at it is this: If you know what a JOA is, this will make sense; if not, you're probably not writing articles about JOAs anyway, so you can skip this guideline. Wiki Wistah 03:30, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Possibly note this somehow so as not to confuse non journalists or those who aren't affiliated with a newspaper in any way. IvoShandor 05:57, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Defunct daily newspapers and defunct daily newspaper companies are notable if they otherwise meet Wikipedia's notability standards, or if they represented the last daily newspaper headquartered in a city. They are not notable if they are simply otherwise-named predecessors to current products or companies; describe them in the text of their descendent's article.
  • Alternative weekly newspapers generally are notable.
  • School newspapers are notable if other campus organizations from that school, college or university are considered notable enough for their own articles.
I'm not saying I'm right to feel this way, but I made a decision a few months into this Wikipedia thing to jettison my usual anal-retentive copyeditor's instinct and yearning for hard-and-fast, black-and-white rules. Put another way: on the Wiki, keeping rules a little subjective is not the end of the world.
As long as it is clear that they can and should be evaluated on a case by case basis, this is especially important concerning new users or project members. IvoShandor 05:57, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Weekly newspaper companies are notable, with the same restrictions as daily companies.
  • Weekly newspapers generally are not notable, but should be listed (with a paragraph of explanation, if possible) on the article about their parent company. But:
  • Disagree: What ends up happening here is the inlcusion (espcially with companies that own a lot of publications) ends up making the article ridiculously long and they get broken off per WP:SUMMARY, this would seem to contradict that guideline, which we shouldn't do. I do think, in general, a newspaper with anywhere over 4 or 5000 in circulation is probably notable. I mean, if every high school on earth is, weeklies are, if every single episode of every single TV series ever made is notable enough for inclusion so are weekly newspapers, as they are oft associated with the very history and development of whatever town or city they are located in.IvoShandor 05:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I understand your point. Large weeklies (in my mind, anything over 10,000) should probably have their own articles. I agonized over whether "small" weeklies should also, and what I came up with was this: most small weeklies' articles would consist of two sentences -- "The Springfield Bugle is a weekly newspaper published in Springfield, State, USA, since 1951. It is owned by Omnipress Inc.," maybe with a third sentence listing circulation. That is, most weekly newspaper articles would end up being stubs OR would end up as T-M-I vanity sites expanded by some well-meaning former employee (or publicity-seeking current employee). To be honest, most weekly newspapers (most I've worked at, anyhow) aren't as interesting as high schools. A high school article can talk about athletics; about the physical plant, about extracurricular clubs, about famous alumni, and a host of other topics; a school, especially a high school, is a community and has its own culture. Small newspapers generally don't have a wide range of WP:NOTE-able items; most of a newspaper's history has more to do with events relating to its coverage area than with the newspaper itself. That being said, there are newspapers that have been newsmakers in their communities ("oft associated with the very history and development," as you note); they would fall under the exception below for "Weeklies that meet Wikipedia's standards for notability ...". Note that this exception will guarantee that most large-sized weeklies are considered "notable". Wiki Wistah 03:30, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
I still disagree. Take an average small town. Often a supposedly non notable weekly was once an important part of that community and its integral to the history of the town, a lot more than a stub could be written about that. Around Northern Illinois a lot of the smaller publications are directly tied people who were historically important to the development of the community and the small, local publication was a large part of that. Material isn't hard to come by as far as sources on many of these publications because things have been written about the people who founded or were associated with them. Perhaps this more appropriately belongs in the articles about said communities but I think it demonstrates that significant articles are possible out of these smaller weekly publcations. I think this should always be determined on a case by case basis. In an active project anything non notable will eventually be deleted by consensus. I think it best not to make such blanket guidelines that imply something is generally not notable when it cannot obviously be determined as a generality. IvoShandor 05:57, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
In addition, notability and newsworthiness are two different things. Just because a newspaper hasn't made the news doesn't make it non notable. IvoShandor 06:00, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
We appear to agree on what my intention was with this guideline -- weeklies shouldn't have their own articles as a matter of course, but some weeklies do deserve that featured treatment. I wholeheartedly agree with your example given about northern Illinois (it's just as true here in Massachusetts), although I feel that the exception given in this guideline ("notable under WP:NOTE") is sufficient to address your concerns. When I used the word "newsmaker" in my commentary above, the sense I had in mind was a general one -- "notable person/place/thing" -- and not the specific "person/place/thing featured in a newspaper." If sources are available, such as history books or town Websites, to justify notability for a small weekly, I'd consider that to be proof of its "newsmaker"-ness, even if the weekly never was written up in the Chicago Tribune.
What we appear to disagree on most is wording (correct me if I'm wrong). We appear to have two different approaches to notability guidelines; to put it crudely, you're "notable unless proven otherwise" (i.e., write the guideline loosely and let 'em all come in; we'll delete the ones that consensus says don't belong), while I'm "non-notable unless proven otherwise" (i.e., be specific in the rule and count on people to ignore it, or to follow its exceptions, when the situation demands it). The advantage of yours is that it's more open; but the drawback, as I see it, is that it will encourage someone with too much free time to start creating article after article, each one two sentences long, about nonnotable weeklies that he happened to find a list of on some corporate website. Then it'll be a headache and a half for some diligent editors to go and delete 'em all. Wiki Wistah 15:33, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Weeklies that are the only paper published by their owner are notable and should get a Wikipedia article in lieu of an article on the owning company.
    • Weeklies that meet Wikipedia's standards of notability for readers outside their circulation areas (e.g., a weekly embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that receives regional coverage) are notable.
I wanted to avoid loading up the guideline with too many examples, but you're right -- I should add something in there to show that this isn't just a negative thing: "a weekly embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that receives regional coverage, or a weekly that breaks a story of regional or national importance" -- or maybe chuck the examples altogether? Wiki Wistah 03:30, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Weeklies that are the only print medium in their region are notable. IvoShandor 05:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Other weeklies may be notable depending on the degree to which they represent a significant source of hard news in a large community. The article should show that this is the case.

Hope this spurs some discussion and I hope it's not too harsh. : ) IvoShandor 05:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

New version coming

At some point in the coming weeks, I'll be writing the long-awaited (or long-dreaded) second draft of these guidelines, incorporating the suggestions and criticisms received on this page. Thanks to ALL OF YOU for helping with this project. Once the second version is up, the first will be archived for comparison's sake; and this talk page will be archived, with a blank slate available for your criticisms of version 2. Thanks!
``` W i k i W i s t a h W a s s a p 15:33, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

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