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 delete. Sandstein 09:14, 21 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ryūkichi Narita (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Rationale borrowed from my previous similar AfD of Keizaburō Saeki, which itself was largely borrowed from Cckerberos (no ping as he's no longer active) at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hideki Kasai. Keizaburō Saeki, Hideki Kasai, and this currently-nominated article are all identical bot-created articles. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hiroshi Nagae is also currently running.

To quote Cckerberos: "This article is a generic stub, generated by a bot in 2007. It makes no specific claim to notability; it appears that similar stubs were created for every photographer listed in 328 Outstanding Japanese Photographers, all with the format "Name (years) is a renowned Japanese photographer" (compare the nominated article with Gen Ōtsuka, for example). Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography states that the sole criteria for inclusion in the book was to have a single photograph in the museum's permanent collection at the time the book was published. That doesn't seem to meet WP:CREATIVE."

In addition to Cckerberos's excellent commentary, I'll note that I've done as thorough a WP:BEFORE check as possible for an English-speaker: Google searches of both the English and Japanese order of the English transliteration of his name. I have also checked the Japanese name. In this case I found no Google book results. He is absent from the reasonably thorough The History of Japanese Photography as well as Photography in Japan 1853-1912. He is mentioned in Photography for Everyone, but only trivially. The Japanese Wikipedia has no article about him, so there are no sources to be borrowed from it. I searched his Japanese name there and found nothing in any other article.

In the absence of reliable sources, we cannot verify that this person is notable, so the article, like many of the previous bot-generated photographers before it, should be deleted.

Courtesy ping to Hoary, who is knowledgeable on the topic of Japanese photographers, and whose commentary on these AfDs is invaluable to me, especially when it causes me to alter my opinion. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 05:28, 13 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Oh, hello? Narita isn't well known these days even among the (fairly high) number of 328. He's the creator of photographs that would appear in exhibitions of work from the 20s and 30s, or at least those exhibitions whose curators aren't dazzled (or don't want viewers to be dazzled) by a very short list of stars. I'd be surprised if anyone would bother to create an article about him, but stranger things have happened. Meanwhile, for search engines to suggest that there's an article on Narita and for there to turn out to be no more than the feeblest stub is an annoyance. Delete without prejudicing any later attempt to create a worthwhile article on the man. -- Hoary (talk) 06:28, 13 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Photography-related deletion discussions. Bakazaka (talk) 06:35, 13 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Japan-related deletion discussions. Bakazaka (talk) 06:35, 13 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Not likely to ever be more than a stub. Even his date of death is unknown. I was unable to find additional sources in JSTOR or Google Books.LoosingIt (talk) 09:42, 14 January 2019 (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.