Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bruno Bergner

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 , with potential for merging some content into an article about Gasolin AG. There's indications below that this has already been done, but if someone needs a userspace copy, let me know. Vanamonde (Talk) 08:13, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Bruno Bergner

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Article lacks quality sources. The first source used in the article which is cited repeatedly cites wikipedia as the main source of its information; basically making wikipedia the source for wikipedia. The second is a dead link whose reliability and quality are uncertain. The other citations are all trivial name drops, some of which don't verify the content they are supposed to be supporting in the article, or dead links of uncertain quality. A WP:BEFORE search yielded nothing promising, but granted foreign language references may exist outside of my ability to locate. Fails WP:SIGCOV and WP:NARTIST. 4meter4 (talk) 05:05, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Artists-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 07:01, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Germany-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 07:01, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Curbon7 (talk) 07:03, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: His article on Deutsch Wikipedia has a number of books on him. Also, regarding the dead link: archive.org is our friend lol. It's entirely in German though, no clue what it says. Not !voting for now, just wanted to clarify the source situations. Curbon7 (talk) 07:11, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- One of those books is Kürschners Graphiker-Handbuch, which is accessible through the Wikipedia Library (via de Gruyter). The 1967 edition does indeed have an entry on Bergner, but it is just this:
  Bergner, Bruno, Graphiker, Ham -
  burg 13, Badestr, 2,
  Vexations (talk) 13:33, 7 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete this is written in the way that a family member or an art dealer would write about someone. The English article was translated from de.wikipedia, which was written mostly by... drum roll... user Jbergner. I can't find much in the way of sourcing, so it is del*te for the moment. ~~That said, the existence of Bruno-Bergner-Straße in Greiz may tell us something.~~ --- Possibly ☎ 07:19, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Struck the street info; not the same Bruno Bergner, per below. --- Possibly ☎ 17:25, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

~~Weak Keep~~, The AutoBild Klassik article that @Curbon7 located is a solid account dedicated to Bergner and describing his impact on German society, and he clearly made a society-wide mark. It would be nice if we could find another similar source, but we have to remember that one source a few decades ago is worth about five nowadays, where someone only needs to sneeze, and (if they have a publicist), there will be 5 articles on it the next day. Nevertheless, the street-name is someone else: [1] (article describes a political activist killed in a concentration camp in 1942 and commemorated by the street name in the town of his birth, and probably also worthy of an article). We also need to be careful that we don't delete the article on this chap merely because his son went into the same business, and has put a biography of his dad on his studio's website. It's natural that he should do so, and says nothing about his father's notability - positive or negative. Elemimele (talk) 11:35, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Elemimele, how would suggest we handle the fact that much of the article is sourced to wikipedia? Not to mention the error in confusing people that you found. There are so many issues here, that it's a nightmare for any editor trying to sort out what's true and what isn't. In my opinion we are just better off deleting this (or at least stubifying it).4meter4 (talk) 12:58, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

4meter4 the AutoBild Klassik article from Curbon7 contains a huge amount of biographical detail and discussion of the importance of his work, at least in respect of the petrol/motoring illustrations. If it's classed as independent and reliable, then it could support most of the article. I can read German and I'm happy to go through screening the article to remove anything not supported. But as I say, it'd be great if there were a second source as I'm not greatly comfortable with single-source articles. I just feel it would be a pity to lose all trace of this chap and his work, when it clearly was influential. Elemimele (talk) 13:46, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Elemimele Thank you for being willing to help out. If it's kept, I'd appreciate you taking the time to do that. Perhaps another source(s) will emerge as this discussion continues. Best.4meter4 (talk) 13:52, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Elemimele: nice work on decoding the street name. Regarding his work being influential, I am not sure of that. There does seem to be a family-driven campaign to say it is influential, both through the first source (Atelier Klaus Bergner/Aatelier-bergner.de) and the author of the German wiki article (Jbergner). I don't think it is a coincidence that the AutoBild Klassik article quotes his son directly, and is also used in this article ("Some years later his son, Klaus Bergner, shared the opinion that his father probably owed his survival in the prison camp to that talent: "My father probably survived [because] ... he painted the apartments of the Russian officers and, from time to time, produced the odd painting"). It's pretty obviously mostly a family effort to memorialize the father. The painting included in the de and en articles was also uploaded by Jbergner. I do not see a source for personal details like the birth/date of death. There is a lot more evidence here that this is a family memorial page than there is of independent recognition. I'm taking the sourcing with a large grain of salt... --- Possibly ☎ 16:51, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're right that a lot of information has come from the son's recollections of his father, but not all of it; Sylvia Lott, the journalist who wrote the AutoBild article, had clearly also interviewed his old collaborator, the advertising manager at Gasolin, whom she also quotes. I think we have to distinguish what his son says directly (for example on the website of the current business) from what an independent journalist reports his son as having said. She is allowed to use sources we cannot, and her screening of their information makes them allowable for us. I also think it's inevitable that a lot of information will come from memories of family and friends. So far as his birth and early life is concerned, we've got to consider the context of post-war Germany: life was incredibly chaotic, records patchy, and half the infrastructure bombed. Human memories may be all we have, and we must trust journalists to make of them what they believe. I've put a translation of part of the article, and a summary of the rest, here [2]. I hope it's okay to do this. I'm conscious that the article is copyright, so we can't just put translations willy-nilly on WP. This is purely to help editors assess whether the information is appropriate as a source, and I'll have to request its deletion as soon as this AfD is sorted out. If Bruno Bergner survives deletion, I am, as above, happy to edit to remove information that can't be found screened via Lott and any other sources anyone can find. As regards his significance: my feeling is that if you are the pen behind a massive advertising campaign over more than a decade, whose work would have been familiar to every household in a major country, then you're probably notable. It's like being the person who made up the image of Super Mario, or the cocoa-pops characters; it might be that no one actually knows who you are, but because your creation is so widely known, it's legitimate for an encyclopaedia to take an interest in your existence. We're here to answer those people who ask, one day, "I wonder who it was, who made that thing that I see every day..." (on which, I'm not totally against merging, if there's somewhere to merge to) Elemimele (talk) 18:46, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's way too convenient that the son gets interviewed in the article about the father's painting, and another relative uploads images of Bergner's paintings. It's obviously a family memorial. The same Citroen image that appears in the AutoBild article was uploaded to Commons by Jbergner. Finally, if he is a famous graphic designer, why don't we see more examples of his graphic designs when doing an image search? All I see in an image search is material that his family uploaded. Which means that while he may have done widely distributed designs, he wasn't recognized for it. --- Possibly ☎ 19:35, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Also it might be that no one actually knows who you are, but because your creation is so widely known, it's legitimate for an encyclopaedia to take an interest in your existence.... no, this is fundamentally incorrect. If no one actually knows who you are, you do not get an article. That would be using Wikipedia to create the memorial. We do have an article on Super Mario creator Yōichi Kotabe, because he is well known and has been widely and independently written about. --- Possibly ☎ 19:51, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're maybe finding coincidences that perhaps aren't really there. The German Wikipedia article, undoubtedly written by a CoI relative, appeared in 2006, while the AutoBild article appeared in 2011, and Bergner died in 1995, so it's not like this is a flurry of memorialisation by the family following his death. Auto Bild isn't the sort of news outlet where you phone one day and ask them to produce an article on your dad. Our own WP describes it as a leading German automobile magazine. And if they chose to write an article about Bergner, it would be decidedly odd if they hadn't sent a journalist to talk to his family. I regard the fact that a leading independent German automobile magazine chose to write two pages on him 16 years after his death as evidence that he is of some notability in at least the German automobile community (a significant sized group). As regards the images, yes, there is one image in common between the German WP article and AutoBild, but the AutoBild article also contains quite a few other images from his work. Thinking from the perspective of Auto Bild, they just wanted some attractive images that their readers might remember with nostalgia; the less effort the better. Much of his work must be under copyright, and probably a copyright whose current ownership is very unclear (it would have been property of Gasolin, passed on to Aral, and goodness only knows where since). I can well imagine they'd use images provided by the family, purely because they're the easiest source. The relevant fact, again, isn't that the image came from family, it's that an independent secondary source thought the image was worth publishing. Elemimele (talk) 20:24, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I can't, however, find anything apart from Sylvia Lott's article, and a lot of his leaflets on e-bay (I'm discounting all WP and atelier Bergner sources, obviously), and that bothers me. If we had a second source, I'd happily go for the full keep, but the fact we've only got one is why I was originally a weak-keep. I'm fighting his corner, but I don't have a personal axe to grind on this. Elemimele (talk) 20:36, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Signing of on this, but I will add that I have edited and created way more than 1000 articles on artists. There's very little evidence of notability here. No museum collections, no published images outside those sourced by family, no entries in dictionaries of artists, no exhibitions of his graphic work, no awards by learned artistic societies. If you cannot read about the person in more than one source, can't see their work in museums, can't find independently published copies of their work online, well, they're not notable. --- Possibly ☎ 21:18, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

fair comment! Elemimele (talk) 22:05, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In view of @Possibly's totally reasonable argument, I'm quite prepared to re-think my original weak keep. As a matter of information, I've started a draft on the petrol-station chain for whom Bergner created his advertising work (Gasolin AG), translating the German WP page [3] (my incomplete draft is at [4]). Since it's Bergner's advertising work that's most memorable, and the Gasolin AG petrol concern was enormous (and far more notable) I think it's reasonable for me to merge a little of Bergner's information into the draft, which to my mind clears the way for deletion of Bruno Bergner from English WP if that's the outcome of this AfD (unless miraculously someone finds more solid sources for him). Meanwhile, minor point: the links in the Bergner article to NITAG are linking to an article on a completely different subject. Elemimele (talk) 12:29, 8 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment The summary of this book says that it discusses Bergner's role as graphic artist in marketing Gasolin AG https://www.zwischengas.com/de/SZ/zubehoer/Gasolin-und-die-Entwicklung-einer-Marke-Buchbesprechung-.html. If Elemimele is looking for a second source, that would seem to be one, but I can't access the book (which is not obviously written by a family member), and without seeing the book I'm also reluctant to do more than make that comment. Sheijiashaojun (talk) 22:47, 14 August 2021 (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.