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Danny Sullivan (technologist)

• Articles for deletion/Danny Sullivan (technologist)
• Articles for deletion/Danny Sullivan (technologist) (2nd nomination)

Danny Sullivan (technologist) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Per subject request (see talk:). A web SEO salesman, not surprisingly, has acquired a WP article. Yet the article fails to clearly demonstrate WP:BLPN notability, mostly due to the quality of the sources used. A Google footprint is not the same thing as a notable career, of encyclopedic merit.

Previously AfDed in 2008, an AfD which was non-admin closed by a now-indeffed editor Andy Dingley (talk) 13:24, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

• I'm not going to vote, but I will point out two falsehoods in the nomination. (1) Mr. Sullivan does not sell SEO services. He's a publisher and conference organizer. (2) The prior AfD was unanimously keep, and the closer does not seem to be indef blocked. close; clean block log Jehochman 13:34, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't know what's happening with that AfD close, but Instinct (disappeared 2010) appears in the page history as the editor doing the close, yet they sign it on behalf of Milk's Favorite Cookie, who is blocked (2009) for account impersonation. Maybe this is all innocent, in which case I withdraw my comment. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:01, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

You've still got it wrong. The account was blocked and then unblocked 2 minutes later, probably because it was a mistaken action. To me it looks like the user might have renamed the account after the edit was made. (Perhaps Milk's Favorite Cookie became Instinct) In any case, the prior AfD appears to have been "regular". Jehochman 15:52, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:51, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Advertising-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:52, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:52, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Businesspeople-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:52, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

• Keep Well-known, well sourced. --Davidcpearce (talk) 22:10, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
• Weak delete Admittedly, at one time there were news articles about him -- 2 or perhaps 3 (I'm getting 404 on the CNET news link). Neither of the articles is what I could consider "in depth." Most of the other links in the article are blogs or non-stable/non-RS sources. Meanwhile, there has been little about him lately that would add to his notability. In fact, I probably would not have considered him notable during the first AfD, but at least then his star was rising. That no longer seems to be the case, and I don't see a lasting legacy. LaMona (talk) 22:13, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

  What do you think about the citations on the talk page? Jehochman 23:33, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

  Replied there. LaMona (talk) 16:19, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

• Keep. Full disclosure: I don't know Danny Sullivan's world very well, and don't have much intuitive sense for who's notable in it and who isn't. But I took a look at the citations on this discussion's talkpage, and several of them seem quite convincing to me: notably the chapter about Sullivan in David Vise's book The Google Story. Also Ken Auletta seems to be a fairly eminent journalist and author, and for him to refer to Sullivan as "the closest approximation to an umpire in the search world" in his 2009 book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It surely counts for something. At least that's the sense I got from checking out our article about Auletta as well as our quite elaborate article about the book itself. Bishonen | talk 21:59, 23 June 2015 (UTC).

• Delete The provided sources are overwhelmingly just news articles quoting something Sullivan said or are primary sources. It comes across as a very concerted effort to appear notable without actually being so. Sullivan does not appear to meet any of the guidelines in WP:BIO. If Sullivan has done something notable that is of lasting historical impact in his field, I can see him being notable, but I am not seeing any evidence of this in his article or the sources provided. 217IP (talk) 02:01, 27 June 2015 (UTC)
• Strong Keep - An article from Fortune this week calls him an "authority" on Google. He started the two top SEO news sites and a marketing site that is notable in its own right. You would basically be deleting the article of the godfather of SEO journalism. This seems like a lazy nomination. Actually research who you are talking about. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 04:49, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

• The Forbes article given above is only a mention. Mentions are nice, but they are not substantial, as the policy requires. I think we are still looking for some substantial coverage that would attest to notability. I looked at some on the list provided on the talk page. Jehochman, so that we don't all have to look through all of the sources you found, could you point out the ones that show extensive coverage? for example, the NYT articles that I accessed are each just a single quote from him, so that doesn't help here with notability. Ditto the Wired articles that I looked at. Thanks, LaMona (talk) 03:25, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

• Delete - I concur with the nominator. Searching for the subject online reveals articles that quote the subject but never discuss the subject. The subject's "notability" appears to be a Kardashianesque self-creation.--Rpclod (talk) 05:43, 27 June 2015 (UTC)
• Keep. Full disclosure: I work at Google. This is my first time participating in a "AfD" discussion; I don't know what the criteria are, and I apologize if I'm doing this wrong. I just wanted to say, from my point of view, Danny Sullivan is a widely recognized authority in the search industry. As just one example, he frequently appears on shows such as This Week in Google on the This Week in Tech network. 50.240.216.94 (talk) 22:35, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

• Since this appears to be your first edit on WP, it would be good to read at least the policy statements in articles for deletion, the policies on notability, and the policies on biographies of living persons. Decisions are made based on those policies, not on the knowledge that persons have in their heads about the subject. If you want us to consider the This Week in Google as evidence of notability, you will need to provide resources that can validate the statement. So that means to also need to read reliable sources and verifiability of facts.If you plan on editing Misplaced Pages in the future, it is a very good idea to create a user name for yourself so that your contributions themselves have an author we can recognize, since IP addresses are not stable identifiers.Hope you stick around! LaMona (talk) 03:33, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

• Maybe if you were nice to this person they would stay around and help build the encyclopedia. Instead, you were unfriendly to them because they didn't agree with you. Jehochman 13:53, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

• Keep. Hi, I'm a novice at Misplaced Pages, so I apologize if I make mistakes on the decision criteria or markup. But I am a Distinguished Engineer at Google, and I would definitely classify Danny Sullivan as notable in the field of search. I'm happy to attest that people within Google take Danny's journalistic coverage quite seriously. I would think the USA Today and New York Times articles would both count toward notability, in that both pieces contain significant coverage of Danny, not just quotes from him. Likewise, the page on notability calls out author/journalist criteria such as "The person is regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by peers or successors." Danny is widely regarded as an important figure and expert source by both fellow journalists (in terms of the number of different journalists who quote him, such as John Markoff or Ken Auletta) and by search engineers as well. When I talk to Google founder Larry Page and say "Danny Sullivan wrote X," Larry might agree or disagree, but Larry knows who Danny is and his expertise. But it sounds like Misplaced Pages prefers published material, so I'd point back to the USA Today and New York Times articles. Or see Chapter 7 ("The Danny Sullivan Show") of the book The Google Story, by David Vise. MattCutts (talk) 05:00, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Matt, Misplaced Pages is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a news archive. That you read some news articles by or about Danny Sullivan doesn't mean that he is notable enough for an encyclopedia entry. If you want to add his information to somewhere where it will be uncontested try adding to a dedicated news archive such as Newslines or similar. -- Sparkzilla talk! 06:53, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

What are you talking about? You are not making any sense at all. News is the rough draft of history. Of course Misplaced Pages articles can be written using news articles as sources. Jehochman 13:42, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

An encyclopedia is a summary of a notable topic. The questions here are 1) what is to be summarized? and 2) is it notable? By comparison, a news archive is not a summary and attempts to capture ALL the news about a topic. It is more concerned with what is newsworthy, a lower bar of inclusion than notability. If we were making a news archive about Mr Sullivan we would include all the news we could find, and consider almost every news article to be notable for that purpose. However, you are trying to make an encyclopedic entry. There appear to be several news articles about Mr Sullivan (plus some anecdotal evidence from Mr Cutts). We'll disregard the anecdotal evidence as just that, and concentrate on Misplaced Pages's rules. Of course, many WP articles are made up of news, especially those about news events, such as a train crash or a shooting. However, that's because the event itself is notable. In this case the question is: is Mr Sullivan notable for an encyclopedia entry? Saying that there's news about him does not make him notable, only that he is newsworthy. He's notable for a "who's who in tech" or "notable figures in the SEO industry", but does he really belong in an encyclopedia? Surely bored editors who are looking for something to do, and "inclusionists" will say yes, but that's a stretch of Misplaced Pages into something beyond its purpose. The question is moot anyway because the decision to keep or delete is made not according to the rules, but to the most powerful group on the page. The ambiguity between these two different functions (news archive and encyclopedia), and how the rules are arbitrarily applied by the most powerful group to suit each situation, is the real problem. -- Sparkzilla talk! 02:48, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

• Keep, I feel this article shows notability, albeit it may need re-written slightly to improve the quality of the article. CDRL102 (talk) 22:43, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

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