David Gerard wrote:
2009/4/27 WJhonson@aol.com:
I'm not saying that people should delete based on Google results in the first place. In fact I am the one who put that note on historical subjects into the policy in the first place a few years back. Subjects who are not necessarily currently talked-up might have been quite the popular rage back in 1920 or 1920 or 1420, and should not be deleted based on current Google searches.
I must say, the blindness of some AFD participants to anything that happened before 1995 can be more than a little annoying ...
I haven't found this to be a big problem in practice, but maybe I've been lucky? A handful of my edge-case biographies of 19th-century individuals have been nominated for AfD, but all survived. One was a translation from a famous 19th-century German encyclopedia (ADB), and nobody could find a single post-1900 source on the man, but it was kept nonetheless, with the justification that having once been included in ADB is sufficient to automatically establish notability. A pleasantly surprising result.
-Mark