Template:Did you know nominations/Crash (magazine)

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: withdrawn by nominator, closed by Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 16:51, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
R Tape loading error, 0:1

Crash (magazine)

(

)

... that the computer magazine Crash got into trouble when its front cover featured a staff member wrestling in a swimsuit with an alien? Source: "Controversial covers, such as .... issue 31's depiction of a swimsuited Hannah Smith wrestling with an alien, often saw sales spikes, despite the protestations of WH Smith, John Menzies and indignant mothers." [1]
- ALT1:... that Crash was Britain's biggest-selling computer magazine in early 1986? Source: "During the period January to June this year, CRASH sold 101,483 copies a month on average — more than any other computer magazine in the country by all accounts." [2]

Reviewed: Josephine Heffernan
Comment: If we've got a lot of hooks to use up, it might be an idea to defer this to February, which would be the 45th anniversary of the magazine's first issue.

Improved to Good Article status by Ritchie333 (talk). Self-nominated at 12:22, 6 December 2018 (UTC).

@Ritchie333: I see a few issues (besides these, the nomination meets the DYK criteria).

I am concerned about the lack of independence in the sourcing here. The GA reviewer had similar concerns. I think everything in the article meets the intent in WP:V but I never feel great about citing the work or person which is the article topic (I usually defend my opinion under WP:WEIGHT.). Happy to have a discussion here.
Moved inline comment below since it's probably a longer discussion. --Izno (talk) 17:09, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
Earwig picks up the lead text as being substantially the same as the description in archive.org. Is that Archive borrowing our lead material... or did we borrow theirs... without attribution? Crash was a magazine dedicated to the ZX Spectrum home computer. It was published from 1984 to 1991 by Newsfield Publications Ltd until their liquidation, and then until 1992 by Europress.
That's a reverse copyvio from the article. It's not strictly speaking archive.org that did it; rather that whoever uploaded the scans probably did a copy and paste of the article lead as a suitable description and simply forgot to put the attribution in the right place. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 14:09, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

I do prefer Alt0, which inspired me to do this review (my first DYK review). That's quite hooky. --Izno (talk) 23:39, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
I do wonder what happened to "girlie tipster" Hannah Smith, she suddenly disappeared in mid-1987 and was never heard from again. Married with three kids teaching somewhere in the Midlands would be my guess. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 14:09, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
If there are any other independent sources anywhere else, I can't find them. Because of the nature of the subject, fans of the magazine after its demise would have probably discussed it on Usenet and then the web (particularly World of Spectrum and related sites) rather than being documented in any books, newspapers or traditional media. It's just old enough to miss out on coverage in internet sources, but not old enough to be documented in paper media; and that seems to be a general issue for things that were best known in popular hacker culture in the mid to late 80s and not thereafter. I think this article is one of those instances where our general policies on notability and reliable sources don't work; if the general lack of independent sourcing was really an issue, somebody would have created Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Crash (magazine) some time in the last ten years. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 14:09, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
@Ritchie333: I am sympathetic to the concern raised. I am however unsatisfied with the conclusion. A lot of articles from any number of years ago have faced deletion when sources could not be identified. Some of those are likely-notable games in non-English languages. Some are characters in fiction that never had sourcing and again for which independent sourcing could not be found. Sometimes it's a high school in Tanzania that gets hit with the deletion stick on notability grounds (or merge stick as is sometimes the case).

A magazine that would be notable from that time period probably should have a book or an encyclopedia or some other dead-tree source saying "here's the list of cool magazines from X period". (See for example the many articles on SFF magazines that Mike Christie has sent to FA.) Crash doesn't. It has a single longform article in a reliable but industry-topical website. That doesn't really meet the bar of WP:GNG and I'm always concerned when an article earns the green checkmark in such a case (last I checked, GAs are broadly supposed to meet our policies and guidelines).

I wonder if we couldn't start a spinout of list of computer magazines#Retro computers, something like list of retro computer magazines (possibly to include old video gaming magazines), where we could put longer-form descriptions of the other magazines that also probably suffer from this (a la the way we deal with characters lists in some cases). That would serve to preserve the work you've done without necessarily the painful leaning this article does on all of the letters to the editor, etc.

I might be being a stickler here in the wrong forum. As I said, this is my first review, so feel free to tell me off or send me off to WP:GAR or similar. I would prefer not to ship this to AFD since that feels unnecessarily adversarial in this context, but that's a valid alternative as well. --Izno (talk) 17:09, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
@Izno: So is this approved? Vincent^LUFan (talk) (Kenton!) 10:30, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
@Vincent60030: You do not need to rush the process. :) --Izno (talk) 17:09, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

I think this just requires a little more poking. I added two sources to the article from 20 minutes of searching. I think between that and Eurogamer, there's enough for a dedicated article. (And even if those didn't exist, I'd redirect to Newsfield before going to AfD.) In the meantime, I think it's worth paring down the primary/affiliated sources within the existing article, both to reduce the trivia-style detail and so as not to overweight to such sources. Unreliable sources like Gremlin Archive and Indie Retro News should be removed and not used for factual claims. Any citation of the magazine itself should be listed as such (not as coming from "Nonowt eZine X"). The article might appear more anemic without the primary source details rounding it out, but that will also ensure that we're sticking to just the encyclopedic detail that our secondary sources have already deemed relevant for a general audience. (not watching, please {{ping}}) czar 18:28, 6 January 2019 (UTC)
And while I haven't touched DYK in a while, wouldn't ALT1 be invalid? Can't cite the magazine itself for the claim that it was "Britain's biggest-selling computer magazine". If that's in the article too, should be removed. czar 18:57, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Do you honestly think Crash issue 33 (October 1986) would have splashed "Crash shoots right to the top! We've done the ton - over 100,000 copies sold monthly" in newsagents throughout Britain if it wasn't true? It's not The Sun (United Kingdom) or the Daily Mail, which are far more worthy candidates for "unreliable sources". What do you think in the Gremlin Archive is lying, untrue or factually questionable? Notwithstanding WP:MERCY I think it would be poorer for the encyclopedia if a key part of my childhood was deleted because of notability. :-( Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 16:53, 7 January 2019 (UTC)