Draft talk:Deer Lake School

Source issue

I always found the Deer Lake School article challenging. Despite being the largest Seventh-day Adventist school on the West Coast, and possibly across Canada, it had the fewest independent sources available for virtually any Canadian Seventh-day Adventist school. However, there is one important independent source you should include: the school's athletics program was featured in a major British Columbia newspaper over their refusal to play games on their Sabbath. (See here.) Including that source will be key to this article's survival.

Now, I understand that some people in the past have viewed the Canadian Adventist Messenger as failing the "independent source" test. I disagree. Per WP: Independent sources, a source is "independent" if it does not have a vested interest in the Wikipedia topic. While the Canadian Adventist Messenger may be owned by the Seventh-day Adventist church in Canada, and Deer Lake school is owned by the British Columbia conference of the Seventh-day Adventist church in Canada which reports to the Seventh-day Adventist church in Canada, there is no direct financial link between the publication and the school. The school does not pay the publication for coverage; the publication does not experience a boost in revenue when the school succeeds; therefore, there is no financial link.

Again, to quote WP:INDEPENDENT: "there is no potential for personal, financial, or political gain to be made from the existence of the publication"--there is no chance for the Canadian Adventist Messenger to experience personal, financial, or political gain from writing about Deer Lake School, therefore it is independent. "Interest in a topic becomes vested when the source (the author, the publisher, etc.) develops any financial or legal relationship to the topic"--there is no financial or legal relationship between the Messenger and Deer Lake School, therefore the Messenger is independent.

To suggest that the Messenger is not independent would be like suggesting that Professor X at Xavier University of Louisiana cannot be an independent source on the Jesuits simply because they're both Catholic organizations, never mind the many degrees of separation between them. A biased source, perhaps, but few sources are truly without bias and again per WP:INDEPENDENT: "independence does not imply even-handedness."

Granted, to my knowledge, the Messenger's coverage of Deer Lake School is quite limited. NorthernFalcon (talk) 02:51, 24 October 2023 (UTC)