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 without prejudice against renominating in one month, when we have a better idea about lasting significance. Discussion about possible merger can continue on the Talk page.
Owen×☎17:37, 27 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Who is/are "they"? Can't you communicate more precisely? Whoever you mean by "they", are you saying there is no value in this ancestor page explicitly referencing previous discussion? Is it better to expect editors to find prior discussion for themselves (or not) instead of expending a few mouse clicks to put prior discussion in front of them?
Flusapochterasumesch (
talk)
02:33, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
But is the immolation really a "reaction"? I thought the trial merely provided a highly visible venue with numerous television reporters present. Is there some other connection? You can reach and say that both subjects are attention-seeking paranoids complaining of conspiracies and unjust persecution by parties including past and present U.S. presidents, but the particulars of the alleged conspiracies seem sufficiently different. Anyway, Agree, not notable97.102.205.224 (
talk)
02:47, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep. You may be correct in saying that the self-immolation isn't a valid or rational or something-else reaction to Trump's criminal trial - fair enough - but how does that make it "not notable" in itself? Clue - it does not. This discussion is about wiping the self-immolation out of (Wikipedia) history: it is *not* about whether or not it is a valid/meaningful/rational *reaction* to any trial. That is a notion introduced after the event by @
SWinxy. You have sadly and blatantly been led by Swinxy and you have conflated two objectively unrelated things leading you to "agree" that Azzarello's impromptu cook-out is "not notable".
Flusapochterasumesch (
talk)
02:58, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
@
Flusapochterasumesch: To clarify, I wasn't trying to conflate the issues, I just thought the fact it wasn't a reaction was a bit non-obvious and so justified a response. The non-notability seemed so obvious to me I didn't think any detailed justification was required, so I just said "yes, of course @
ElijahPepe is right." I did not mean (but wasn't clear in my writing, sorry) to imply that the long rationale justified my agreement.
The reason I think it's obviously non-notable is
Wikipedia is not a newspaper. The incident is shocking enough to have received a burst of attention, but it seems obvious it won't be
WP:SUSTAINED#SUSTAINED, won't be important history, and thus will fail the notability requirement. Full discussion of what it takes to make a single event notable at
Wikipedia:Notability (events).
“
Routine kinds of news events (including most crimes, accidents, deaths, celebrity or political news, "shock" news, stories lacking lasting value such as "water cooler stories," and viral phenomena) – whether or not tragic or widely reported at the time – are usually not notable unless something further gives them additional enduring significance.
”
clearly applies here. If there are grounds for "additional enduring significance", please specify; I can't see any. This is one case where the disconnectedness is relevant. If the immolation were indicative of the public's depth of feeling about Trump's trial, it would be relevant to that larger, notable, issue. But someone photobombing the reporters in a particularly gruesome way has to be independently notable.
97.102.205.224 (
talk)
07:06, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
It read to me like Azzarello chose the location to grab publicity, not as a "reaction" or protest for or against the proceeding or defendant. -
A876 (
talk)
02:36, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Wait I'm biased since I created the article about
Aaron Bushnell but I already see enough news about this incident that I think it will warrant an article. That being said, only time will tell.
HadesTTW (he/him •
talk)
02:29, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep It has been covered by multiple reliable sources and was not a reaction to the trial itself.
Keep - From the sources I've read, Azzarello seems to have had a complex political motivation behind his actions that went beyond merely reacting to Trump's trial. Only time will tell, of course, but it's a reasonable assumption that this incident will continue to be notable enough to deserve it's own article.
Royz-vi Tsibele (
talk)
04:06, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Based on what I've read, I feel it's safe to say that Azzarello's motivations were indeed complex; however, the extent to which they were political is open for debate. Mental illness is tragic.
DS (
talk)
04:51, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep as a clear case of
WP:RAPID. Literally only 1 day has passed since the event. Not even the initial news coverage has passed, and we're talking about lasting notability that can't really be proven until at least a few weeks later.
106.71.58.30 (
talk)
06:04, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep. This is a rare media case where graphic detail was caught in real time. I have also seen criticism in how security was handled around the scene. But most of all, this appears to have
WP:DEPTH especially how the NYT went into detail about Maxwell's life. -
Knowledgekid87 (
talk)
07:34, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep. We're about 24 hours on from the self-immolation event, and the individual has now died. If this WP article didn't already exist and there was a debate about whether to create an article, I would be profoundly apathetic. However, the article does exist and the debate is about whether or not to delete it. In my opinion, it's a perfectly written/structured article that very succinctly details the event. It mentions exactly when and where it occurred - outside of a New York court - and it mentions a notable case being heard in the court at the time of the event. The protester chose his time and location to link his protest to the ongoing trial - going by the protester's writings it is clear that he believed his protest "mattered" in the context. However, it appears the protester was severely mentally unwell - while he perhaps thought the world would applaud his "stand" and understand the "importance" of his actions, it seems he was utterly wrong. The article doesn't give any validation to the individual's apparent reason for his protest, which I think is absolutely proper. Will the protest change anything? Probably not. Hopefully not. And the article doesn't suggest it will. I guess what I am saying, to summarise, is that this was a significant event, but it had no notable outcome (except the death of the protester and some burn marks on the sidewalk). Self-immolations in the past have changed the course of history. This one hasn't. There's something notable about the fact that a person's mental health led him to believe that burning himself to death for his "beliefs" would effect change and give him a place in history. I suspect it will: but only from the perspective of research & discussion into how contemporary society (and the internet) contributed to such erratic and meaningless self-harm. Also, books will no doubt be written about the trial in the court near to where Maxwell killed himself. And some of those books will no doubt mention Maxwell's suicide. Creating an article on Maxwell's pointless protest would be pointless. But deleting the existing article would be more pointless - it has value and it detracts from nothing/no-one.--
Flusapochterasumesch (
talk)
13:25, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep This subject is undeniably notable and has had significant coverage. A Google search for "Maxwell Azzarello" on the news tab currently returns "about 7,840 results". Even if Google's result numbers are not accurate, you can clearly see that there have been dozens of articles in different publications, all of which are about this incident.
GranCavallo (
talk)
13:40, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Delete Not notable, wiki is not a newspaper, will not pass the 5 year or even 1 year test. We do not cover every time someone with mental health issues tries to take their life in a spectacular way, and just because it grabs headlines for a day does not make it notable for the purpose of this project.
Dreameditsbrooklyn (
talk)
13:46, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
To be clear, this is a person who deliberately committed suicide in a difficult, inconvenient and highly public fashion, for the explicit purpose of drawing attention to his ideological beliefs -- what is the exploitation? Acknowledging his existence is exploiting him? jp×
g🗯️18:40, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Doesn't this go against WP:NOTCENSORED? I don't think the article shouldn't stay up just because the deceased has been deemed "unwell".
Yannkemper (
talk)
21:08, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
My apologies to both of you. Notability or the lack of it is of course a Wikipedia policy. Basic human decency is of course not a Wikipedia policy.→StaniStani04:18, 21 April 2024 (UTC)reply
I am saying nothing about policy: I am saying that your claim is false and your argument is bad. To reiterate, your argument here is that you think this guy was nuts, so "human decency" dictates that we go out of our way and bend the rules to prevent anybody from reading the thing that he thought was so important he set himself on fire to get people to read? What in the world are you talking about? Decency dictates we do the exact opposite of this. jp×
g🗯️07:29, 23 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Delete To establish notability on fr.wp it is necessary to have two secondary sources (at least national press) primarily focused on the subject of an entry which are separated by at least two years. On en.wp, insofar as the person is recently deceased and was low-profile before the event
WP:BLP1E still applies in order to protect family from unwanted attention.
WP:NOTMEMORIAL,
WP:NOTNEWS, and
WP:NOTPROMO (articles seem to be focused on his substack) all apply and override newspaper coverage the day of and the day after the event. If two years from now, there are scholarly (or even journalistic) treatments of this event we could revisit the question of whether this passes the so-called 10-year test, but for the time being BLP concerns and violations of 3 different subsections of
WP:NOT "trump" newspaper coverage (even if international) on the day of the one event. --
SashiRolls 🌿 ·
🍥16:41, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
I apologize, I see where you a coming from. You have perhaps not put as much importance as I have on the fact that the person's name is in the title of the entry. --
SashiRolls 🌿 ·
🍥17:05, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Neither BLP1E nor BIO1E applies here as this article is about the event. The point of those is that if someone's only known for one event, we should write our article about the event, instead of about the person. That's how this article is written.
Elli (
talk |
contribs)
19:35, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
The article title should define what the article is about. If the entry is not about the individual, it should not contain the individual's name. If it were only about the event, it would be titled "Self-immolation in Collect Pond Park".--
SashiRolls 🌿 ·
🍥03:37, 21 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Merge — There is already a section in the article
Reactions to the prosecution of Donald Trump in New York ("#Self-immolation") where the whole thing can be inserted. Maxwell Azzarello's death was ghastly, needless, sensational, and intentionally carried out so that it would be associated with a major news story, but I don't think it is a notable news story in itself. It was just another poor victim of the conspiracy theory culture that has been festering in the US for some time. It deserves a mention as a further lamentable example of death by conspiracy theory, along with, perhaps, all the dead antivaxers who swore by Ivermectin, but I can't imagine that an article about Maxwell Azzarello could ever expand beyond what it already is.
Kelisi (
talk)
17:11, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Delete or Merge - This is exactly what
WP:NOTNEWS,
WP:BLP1E, etc. are meant for. With absolutely any article on a new topic, we get a choice between
WP:DELAY and
WP:RAPID. Best we can do is estimate whether the requirement of sustained coverage and is highly likely to be met and whether other considerations like
WP:NOPAGE and
WP:BLP push us to err on one side or the other. In this case, I'm just not seeing the level of coverage I'd expect for lasting coverage. There's not virtue to leaving a stand-alone article alone and waiting rather than merging it and spinning it out later if deserved. It's the latter that we should be deferring to anyway when there's an obvious place to cover it. — Rhododendritestalk \\
17:58, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Delete Someone needs to write an essay "Wikipedia is a Newspaper" because every time we have some event like this, someone rushes to write an article, others rush to insert all the news coverage, and the inevitable AfD is filled with outraged "keep" voters, because "of course it's notable". But arguments that it is covered by international news sources do not recognise that every single source being presented is a primary source, and does not count towards notability. Is this notable? Will historians be writing about this event or this person? Who knows. We are
WP:TOOSOON by a long way and Wikipedia is a lagging indicator of notability. Or at least, that's the policy. But policy can take a running jump, because all these news reports mean it must be notable, right? ... right? I'll be outvoted. This will be kept. Maybe I'll just start essay writing.
WP:NOTNEWS,
WP:BLP1E, fails
WP:GNG (primary sources) and also
WP:N under arm 2 (because it fails
WP:NOT).
Sirfurboy🏄 (
talk)
18:28, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
That would be WP:NOTNOTNEWS, which would mandate that everything that happens with at least one reliable secondary source must have an article written for it ... • Bobsd • (
talk)
20:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep - Enough noteworthiness through the number of articles and enough content for the page from his substack/motivation that there's really no reason to delete
Gabecube45 (
talk)
18:35, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep: The idea that we need to delete this article due to humanitarian concerns is very unconvincing to me. To be clear: this is a person who deliberately committed suicide in a difficult, inconvenient and highly public fashion, for the explicit purpose of drawing attention to his ideological beliefs, and getting people to read what he had to say about the global conspiracy to destroy the world economy and install a totalitarian dictatorship. I don't think his claims are true, but whatever. Frankly, this is less destructive than the
other thing people have been doing the last few years to guarantee notoriety and attention to their ideas, and we seem to love those sickos enough to write a novel on request whenever they do that -- at any rate, maybe I will change my mind on this and want to merge the article in a year or so, and I look forward to chiming in on that then. jp×
g🗯️19:07, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Keep or reassess in the future. Easily fits
WP:RAPID. We will know more in the future about whether this keeps popping up, but for now, I believe we should keep it. You can see the notability difference between Azzarello's immolation and an immolation like
Arnav Gupta's due to Azzarello having publicized his own views and thoughts. But I still believe we should reassess this soon. Deleting it now is silly in my opinion.
Réunion!22:01, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Delete per
WP:BLP1E (BLP is extended to recent deaths). The New York Timesanalysis article provides a little information about his life, but in the context of his having become incoherent in recent years, and the article itself demonstrates that his action has no effect on the trial or the public discourse. The overwhelming majority of coverage is just the news event. The most this merits is a half line or line in our article on the trial, as part of a mention of the people who've been gathering with banners in the park, and I think if there is such a mention, it should not include his name. No mention in
Self-immolation unless there is some lasting effect or discussion. Privacy concerns outweigh any argument for inclusion.
Yngvadottir (
talk)
22:39, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
This is an erroneous interpretation of
WP:SUSTAINED. If news sources cover an issue for a few days, that does not mean that it is not a brief burst of coverage, brief bursts of coverage do not have to be confined to a single day.
Hemiauchenia (
talk)
02:19, 21 April 2024 (UTC)reply
obvious
WP:NOTNEWS delete All those crying "significant coverage!" are ignoring what policy actually says, particularly the part about sustained coverage. There's going to be a flicker of further over the next couple of days as reporters try to get a handle on the details of this guy's problems, but unless something surprising is revealed, he's going to be a minor sideshow in Trump's trial. The immediate rush to write an article on any news development, particularly something shocking like this, is just not what an encyclopedia does.
Mangoe (
talk)
02:12, 21 April 2024 (UTC)reply
It does seem like there's a conversation worth having along the lines of: "Does setting yourself on fire guarantee your place in the historical record on Wikipedia?" Looking at similar articles, there's little coverage after a week or two beyond loop-closing stories and the occasional "remember when this happened" in articles about different subjects. There's also another type of brief mention when they come up: when someone else, seeing all the coverage this sort of act attracts, does the same thing and attracts another news cycle of attention. I know, I know,
WP:NOTCENSORED and Wikipedia is a tertiary source, but let's not pretend decisions here don't matter, either. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have this sort of article; I'm arguing that if we find ourselves remotely in the gray area of notability (which is typically the case of any incident that just happened), then subjects like someone killing themselves as a protest are where we should be erring on the side of caution rather than "it's getting some news coverage; let's wait and see". FWIW, I'm pretty sure I've said the same thing about e.g. mass shootings, too... not that Wikipedia doesn't reliably rush to cover those as soon as the first tweets go out. :/ — Rhododendritestalk \\
03:20, 21 April 2024 (UTC)reply
A bit off topic, but it's pretty clear that the guy had a form of psychiatric illness, rather than conspiracy theories, per se.
KlayCax (
talk)
06:00, 21 April 2024 (UTC)reply
None of this is a valid argument for keeping the article. And unless you knew him personally (which you obviously did not), you're really not qualified to make an unverified comment on his mental state of mind prior to his death.
💥Casualty• Hop along. •16:16, 21 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Procedural close per
WP:RAPID. I would not have created the article and I suspect, in the fullness of time, the article will be merged somewhere more appropriate per
WP:RECENTISM, but we're kidding ourselves if we can assess whether this meets
WP:GNG (that is, both notability and non-exclusion under
WP:NOT) so soon.
IgnatiusofLondon (he/him •
☎️)
12:09, 21 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Procedural close per Ignatius. AFD is not a crystal ball; many people are saying that this article will or will not be relevant in a couple weeks' time, but at this point it's too early to tell. If the coverage as of now is indeed the only lasting coverage, this article should be condensed into a section on
Prosecution of Donald Trump in New York. If more, significantly different coverage comes along, then we should keep it.
Delete, or Merge to
Reactions to the prosecution of Donald Trump in New York#Self-immolation or
List of political self-immolations Yes, it did receive coverage in the news, but a lot of the coverage is
WP:PRIMARYNEWS sources, and that does not automatically make a news story notable. Per Rhododendrites, Dreameditsbrooklyn, and others above, I'd actually argue that this violates
WP:NOTNEWS. For a news story to be notable, it needs to have
WP:LASTING effects, which haven't been proven here yet. Furthermore, I have
WP:BLP1E concerns about the existence of this article. While it's unfortunate that this man was driven to self-immolate based on a conspiracy theory, this would be a
WP:MILL event if it were not for the venue of the self-immolation, outside a courthouse in NYC where Trump is being tried. I'm not seeing why we need a separate article, as opposed to mentioning this incident in another article, per
WP:NOPAGE. –
Epicgenius (
talk)
17:25, 22 April 2024 (UTC)reply
If it merged somewhere, I don't think it should be there. If you read his manifesto, it is not Trump-centric at all, rather it's anti-crypto and other self-identified ponzi type schemes, which he saw as an overall conspiracy.
List of political self-immolations is a better place (where it already is mentioned) • Bobsd • (
talk)
04:39, 23 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Merge To the list of political self-immolations. While this event is certainly getting a lot of coverage, it is too soon to predict if it will have lasting notability. That being said, since this event is ultimately entirely unrelated to any wider political issue and was fueled by a random conspiracy theory, I personally find it very unlikely that any further discussion of it will be occurring months or years from now. There's really not much to say aside from the fact that it happened and that it was shocking but ultimately meaningless.
Di (they-them) (
talk)
19:27, 22 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Strong Keep for the numerous valid reasons already above the basic obviousness of
WP:RAPID. ₪— CelticWonder(
T·
C)"
Strong Keep I am actually surprised that this was even nominated for deletion. At least in its current state it is a well-written description of a notable, but separate, part of a historic event in US politics.
ErieSwiftByrd (
talk)
23:00, 22 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Notable very notable. It was headline of the news around the world, it was discussed on Twitter a lot. But after reading some of the comments about recentism / notability / etc I'm not so sure anymore. In general I think wikipedia should be more permissive, when in doubt retain.
Stefek99 (
talk)
12:43, 27 April 2024 (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.