Talk:Fognews

This article was nominated for deletion on 15 December 2012 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

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Nominated for deletion

The reasons:

This site does not seem to be significant enough to deserve its own article, at least in English Wikipedia, specifically because:
- they publish made-up “news”, but without a clear identification of their nature (unless a reader understands their motto in latin);
- all their stories are in Russian only (by the way, the Russian Wikipedia does not have an article about it, and my personal opinion is that they lack notability even for russian audience, see explanation below);
- since their “news” are fake, most of citations by other mass-media are either unconcise reposts of “information” or apologies for such unresponsive reposts, or stories about such reposts and how fool are those who repost such “news”;
- the reference to “The New York Times” cannot be considered a reliable source, because it actually is “International Herald Tribune: Global Opinion — Views from around the world”, located in blogs subdomain, and authored by an expatriate.
The article might have been written as a form of self(?)-promotion, taking into account that:
- the very same day when this article has been created, a comment has been posted on MyWOT rating page, referencing this article in English Wikipedia as a sign of this site's excellence;
- the aforementioned comment was made by a recently created MyWOT user, which only posted 1 reputation rating and 1 comment (to this site), yet it quickly topped the comment list in the next 6 days — by being cross-approved by a small army of sock puppets.
To add to the “dark techniques of promotion” picture, — they might be responsible or somehow connected with the russian McDonald's site deface on April 1, 2012; they even didn't hesitate to post a story about this, including an interview with the hacker (which could also be a fake, unless they know each other in person). Anyway, the deface really took place — I saw it myself, this was exactly how I became aware of Fognews site.
- By following one of their site visitor statistics (in the bottom of any page), Top.Mail.Ru, one can see that the maximum traffic took place exactly at the time of McDonald's incident.
- In their article, they say that the hacker put the link to their site on McDonald's page in regard to their bravery in telling the truth(!), which is very doubtful, because their domain was registered just 2 months before that.
- By observing the very same statistics over the subsequent months, one can see that the traffic is extremely variating, with peaks perhaps connected with other incidents of unfair advertisements.
- Current popularity is about 1500 daily visitors, which is very few for a “notable” media.

I'm not about to speculate on hacking and rating manipulation, though, this is just to warn about their methods of promotion. The main reason for nomination is the lack of significance. 82.199.107.209 (talk) 19:22, 15 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]