Talk:Willamette Week

NPOV

This is a very thorough article, but reads like marketing material for the paper. It needs some work. -Pete 19:06, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Also needs some further copyediting--italics, wikifying, and rewording here and there. Oh yeah, and the formatting's wonky. Katr67 19:37, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Start

To improve to B class: no trivia section, general clean-up to reach NPOV. Aboutmovies 07:52, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

To improve the article

Somebody anonymous just did a good job improving the article. Thanks, whoever! I'd like to suggest we take this a step further, as it's been tagged for some time, and is a fairly important article.

I believe a number of the items need to be deleted. I suggest the "Notable articles" section should be considered by the following criterion: is the Willamette Week's coverage notable? As opposed to, is the event notable? The best way to judge this is whether the Willamette Week's coverage of the issue was mentioned by other reliable sources. WW's role in the Goldschmidt story, for instance, was noted several times by the Oregonian and the Portland Tribune, and also earned the reporter a Pulitzer prize; so that one would clearly stay. But for most of the other stories, while their subject was notable enough to warrant coverage, are not necessarily notable as Willamette Week stories.

Any comments before we start whacking and trimming? The paper definitely merits a better article than this, so let's get this taken care of! -Pete (talk) 05:17, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Good idea Pete. VanTucky ^Talk 05:20, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

This page backs up many of the claims in the article; however, note the use of the word "we." This is probably a self-description submitted by Willamette Week. Any opinions on whether this qualifies as a reliable source, regarding the specific claims made? For a start, I'd say it is sufficient to establish that WW's owners also own the SF Reporter. (Which I also know to be true independently.) -Pete (talk) 07:28, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I finally acted on this suggestion, removing a number of items. I also removed some content from the Sam Adams section that wasn't supported by the source cited. -Pete (talk) 16:58, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Alumni section

Should we even have a list of former staff members? Graywalls (talk) 19:12, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

What's the harm in it? Most articles about towns include lists of notable past residents, etc. Are you deleting this interesting content in accordance with a policy you can cite? Or do you just feel snarky this morning? Eleuther (talk) 23:22, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

When I do see people in pages about cities and their tie and lasting effect on the history is minimal, I do indeed remove them. Just having a Wikipedia page and having worked/lived somewhere is not a justification of being on the target page. Graywalls (talk) 00:39, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Well, among the alumni you so facilely deleted on this ground are (the quotations are from the linked WP pages, which you could have reached with a single click):

• Byron Beck: From 2001 to 2008. Beck authored Willamette Week's "Queer Window" column.
• John Callahan: From 1983 until his death 27 years later, Callahan's work appeared in the Portland newspaper Willamette Week. The controversial nature of his cartoons occasionally led to boycotts and protests against the paper.
• Katherine Dunn: In 1981, Dunn started writing about boxing in the Willamette Week.
• Susan Orlean: She ... began writing for the Willamette Week

I think in all decency you should put the section back. If you then want to argue that some of the entries should be removed, that would be another matter, but the polite way to do it would be to add something like a citation-needed template to the entries, instead of just unilaterally whacking them. Anyhow, deleting the entire section does not seem to be justified according to your criteria, or any WP policy that I know of, though I'm not an expert in that area. Eleuther (talk) 03:13, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Eleuther on this. The author's list is interesting and offers a further glimpse into the history of the publication. Constablequackers (talk) 14:09, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

@Eleuther:, I dispute that "polite thing to do" would not be a reason to justify the inclusion of unrerefenced contents with due/undue weight issues. Before including them, the restoring editor should be responsible for citing them with notability relevance with respect to Willamette Week not the presumption of notability just because they have a Wikipedia page of their own. Consider Disneyland as an example. It's not appropriate to include any and all prior cast members that now have their own Wikipedia page into Disneyland. Graywalls (talk) 22:05, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

I cited notable relationships to the magazine above. Did you not read what I wrote? Beck: columnist for 7 years. Callahan: cartoonist for 27 years. etc. Eleuther (talk) 09:44, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Why don't you find sources not dependent on the article subject itself and cite these things in the article then? Graywalls (talk) 17:18, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

The sources are cited in the linked Wikipedia articles. There's no need to repeat the citations here. Eleuther (talk) 19:30, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Other publications on Wikipedia have similar sections. The Los Angeles Times, for example, has an extensive "Notable employees" section with a list of dozens of individuals and their titles. The Disneyland comparison doesn't really apply here, because former cast members with their own Wikipedia pages didn't earn their notability by loading guests onto the Pirates of the Caribbean's boats while they were in high school or college. I think it's time to put this section back. Constablequackers (talk) 09:17, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

As with most questions on Wikipedia, IMO the main consideration should be, is such a section useful to the reader? I believe this section is useful, because knowing about any "alumni" (or current staff) who are notable in their own right helps the reader form a clearer mental picture of the publication, and whose minds and words it has drawn upon. That said, the section would be more useful if it used full sentences, and I agree with Graywalls that citations on this page (even if they are to articles in WW) would be ideal. (Their absence is not cause for deleting the content, though, IMO, since they may be easily copied from the other articles.) -Pete Forsyth (talk) 18:39, 28 April 2020 (UTC)