Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dorian Parker

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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 Keep. People seem to have forgotten the spirit, rather than letter, behind the rules and guidelines that we have. The reason we have a general notability guideline in the first place is to adhere to WP:V - the idea that articles should be verifiable. The notability principle exists as a corollary of this to say that to ensure the verifiability of content, the subjects of the articles that contain that content must indicate that they can reasonably satisfy the verifiability standard by having multiple, citeable sources that can be relied on to validate added content. This is why the standard for notability is "sourcing" rather than something like relative importance: it's an objective standard that takes into account the need for verifiability.

The problem with this objective standard is that it sometimes leaves out content that really should be included. For that reason, subject-specific notability guidelines were created like WP:POLITICIAN. They exist to augment the general notability guideline by providing for cases where, while the subject may not pass the GNG at the time of the creation or deletion discussion, they held a position (or hold a position) which has substantial media attention focused on it, resulting in the creation of sources we can use that we just can't find at the time of the deletion discussion/creation (whether this is a valid approach to take, I will not comment on; not my role). But the fact of the matter is that these guidelines exist to augment the general notability guideline for subjects, not to supersede the general notability guideline. In other words, whether someone passes WP:POLITICIAN having passed WP:GNG is moot; they've passed the GNG.

People haven't really discussed the GNG, or the concept of "notability", preferring to focus on the guideline for politicians: this sort of makes it difficult to make a judgment call. We're saved from Yet Another Relist by User:Sjakkalle, who was kind enough to note that "The article is reasonably well sourced and should pass the general notability guideline" in his comments (the italicising is mine). With that argued for, and in the absence of anyone arguing that she is, regardless of secondary guidelines, not notable, it's a fairly obvious keep. In future I'd suggest people start arguing from first rather than second, third or thirty-seventh principles: WP:POLITICIAN and the other secondary guidelines were created for circumstances where people failed the GNG but held an important office. The argument being made around it here is the complete inverse of that. Ironholds (talk) 01:08, 21 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Dorian Parker

Dorian Parker (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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After checking references in news archives, does not seem to meet the requirements of WP:POLITICIAN ManicSpider (talk) 05:21, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. ManicSpider (talk) 06:07, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. ManicSpider (talk) 06:09, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or redirect to Barrie,_Ontario#Recreational_facilities - It seems she must have had a quiet death as this Barrie council letter is the only evidence I have found of her death and although it only briefly talks about her, it does list her terms. It seems she received a fair amount of attention while alderman and mayor with Google News archives results here, here and here (inaugural announcement as mayor). I also found links for the Centre here and here. There is a link here which is not relevant to her political career but rather attending a hockey game in Spokane, Washington. Google Books also found one result here (third from the top). SwisterTwister talk 23:53, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Although improvement is certainly needed, Barrie is a city large enough that its mayors are notable per WP:POLITICIAN. The relative paucity of web-available sources does not disprove that, either, as Barrie Examiner content from the 1970s isn't all that likely to turn up in computerized international news retrieval databases — rather, its distribution is almost certainly limited to Canada. I'll certainly take a stab at improving this, but WP:POLITICIAN is quite clear that mayors of significantly-sized cities are notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia. Keep. Bearcat (talk) 00:27, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I disagree WP:Politician says "significantly-sized cities" - it says "national, state or provincial legislature", which is a very different thing. Other politicians should have "received significant press coverage" or meet the general notability requirements. - ManicSpider (talk) 03:00, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • I'm sorry I can't always keep straight what's in WP:POLITICIAN vs. what's in WP:POLOUTCOMES instead — but as the latter will clarify better than the former does, AFD most certainly has established a very clear precedent in favour of keeping mayors of cities the size of Barrie. And again, your failure to find coverage of Ms. Parker in an electronic news database doesn't disprove that, as the Barrie Examiner, to name just one paper in which she's likely to have received considerable coverage, is a newspaper that isn't likely to be distributed in any news database that you can access from Australia — if a Canadian, who would obviously have access to a much wider range of Canadian publications than you do, still couldn't find coverage of her, then that might be different, but Paul Erik already found at least one citation in The Globe and Mail, the absolute gold standard newspaper of record for Canadian topics, within just five minutes of my asking for assistance, so there's clearly more coverage out there to be found if and when somebody can devote more than five minutes to the task. Wikipedia does not require its sources to be available electronically — even if someone has to dig into some oldfangled microfilms at their local reference library, that still counts as valid sourcing — and the failure of one news database to contain all possible Canadian newspapers does not mean that no valid sources exist in other locations. And at any rate, the article already contains five distinct sources, which is more than sufficient to demonstrate basic notability even if the prospect of locating additional sources were anywhere near as poor as you seem to think it is. Bearcat (talk) 02:16, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep – Barrie is large enough that multiple newspapers would have been writing about its mayor in the 1970s even if those newspapers are difficult to access. But I was able to find an article about her from The Globe and Mail which I have added just now. Paul Erik (talk)(contribs) 01:47, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • weak Delete Barrie is large enough now at 133,000 for its mayor to be notable. In 1970, its population was 26,000; In 1976, it would not have been large enough that the mayor is notable.. Our practical cutoff seems to be at 50,000. It is only rational to go by the historical status at the time . (We will need to make adjustments for overall population growth in the world, or perhaps the country, but I don't have any immediate proposal for quantitating that. ) DGG ( talk ) 01:56, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • The practice has traditionally been that if a city is large enough now that its mayors qualify as notable, then any historical mayor who can be reasonably sourced can have an article regardless of how big or small the city was at the particular time they were mayor. Even New York City and Los Angeles once had populations below 50,000 too — yet we don't apply a "population in their own era" cutoff to separate notable from non-notable mayors of those cities. Rather, as long as valid sources are present anybody who's ever been mayor of those cities is a valid article topic regardless of the city's population during their mayoral term. Bearcat (talk) 16:04, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, KTC (talk) 01:27, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Except that WP:POLOUTCOMES — which is every bit as binding as WP:POLITICIAN in the absence of a compelling reason to make an exception, because it's a corollary document that's meant to be read in tandem with notability rules — specifically does say exactly that. Bearcat (talk) 01:57, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. I agree with Bearcat's analysis. Barrie is a fairly significant population centre, and the mayor of such a city is naturally the focus of some attention. The article is reasonably well sourced and should pass the general notability guideline. Sjakkalle (Check!) 17:35, 20 January 2013 (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.
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