Talk:Don Gerard

Speedy Request

Looking at page history, a significant number of the edits and content was created by user: dongerard65, presumably the subject himself. No real assertion of notoriety aside of being a small downstate mayor in a rural community. There is significant puffery here. None of the "seminal bands" he played with have pages of their own. His "top musicians with political cred" is some blog and author both of whom are completely unknown. Jamminjimmy (talk) 02:10, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

• Note that Jamminjimmy is in a legal dispute with the subject of this article and has had one sock puppet banned (Hackwayinteresting). eaolson (talk) 03:11, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

References

Information in the "Personal" section

The following is from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Don Gerard; I'm copying it here to start the discussion.

Also, the material you added is the epitome of small-town coverage: his ex-girlfriend and some guy he had an argument with have applied for protection orders against him. The ex's additional application for an emergency anti-stalking order was rejected and the other guy's application was also turned down. I removed the latter from the article as it gave undue weight to what was, essentially, a non-event. The three sources were all local: two from the city newspaper and one from a newspaper in a town 50 miles away. Dricherby (talk) 21:17, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

The The News-Gazette (Champaign-Urbana) is not "the city paper" - it is a newspaper with coverage across nine counties, where 300,000 or so people live, less than a third of whom are in the city of Champaign. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:36, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I've trimmed the text in the "Personal" section of the article, to be more consistent with WP:UNDUE. But I strongly disagree with your analysis that something is a "non-event" because a judge refuses to grant a requested order. By that reasoning, an acquittal in a trial would mean the trial was a "non-event" and should not be covered in Wikipedia.

I also think it is unfair, in the middle of a discussion of whether an article should be deleted or not, to start trimming the article with what I think is, at best, a controversial rationale. I think other editors should be able to see the full scope of what might be in the article if it survives, and decide for themselves if something is unimportant. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:36, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

A refusal to grant an order is not at all comparable to an acquittal at trial. Holding a trial already implies that the case against the accused is plausible, whereas anyone can go to the court and apply for an order that might end up being denied. I contend that the coverage of these two legal cases is excessive: the current article spends 136 words discussing the two court orders (one applied for and not yet decided, one rejected) but only 126 words discussing everything that he's done in two years as mayor. How about replacing the second paragraph with something like, "In May 2013, an application for a no-contact order by local musician Jim Bean was turned down"?

I disagree with your argument about "unfairness", though it's somewhat moot now that the AfD was closed ("No consensus") after you posted your comment. You added the material because you felt it ought to be in the article; I removed it because I felt it shouldn't. The standards required for material in articles don't change just because the article is at AfD. You say that editors should "decide for themselves if something is important", and I'm an editor and that's exactly what I did: I decided for myself that it wasn't important so I removed it (and said so at the AfD, precisely to avoid the possibility that I had hidden something that people might take to be evidence of notability). I also disagree that my removal of the text was "controversial". "Controversial" is when a bunch of people say it should be in the article, a bunch of people say it shouldn't and we have a big argument about it; so far, this is just a disagreement between two people. Dricherby (talk) 22:25, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I've removed the "Personal" section, for two reasons. First, WP:BLPCRIME says "For people who are relatively unknown, editors must give serious consideration to not including material in any article suggesting that the person has committed, or is accused of committing, a crime unless a conviction is secured." I'm not sure whether Don Gerard is "relatively unknown", but it seems best to err on the side of caution. Second, because of the relative paucity of information (in the Wikipedia article) about other aspects of Gerard's life, even a very trimmed-down section still seems to have WP:UNDUE potential issues, as noted above.

But I'm putting a link here to the deleted text, in case the article is expanded, or the issues here become much more widely discussed in the media and it's thus appropriate to use the sources cited in the deleted text: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Don_Gerard&diff=557057555&oldid=557056294

-- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:07, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

I think removing the text from the article was a good move. Isn't the usual deal that material (particularly negative) that's removed from a BLP shouldn't be put on the talk page? A link to the relevant version in the history might be more appropriate. Dricherby (talk) 20:12, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Good point; done. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:47, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

I re added the personal section because of a civil case that was just settled between him and his ex-girlfriend. Smodi5 (talk) 10:12, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Ummm....

As of the last election, Gerard isn't mayor anymore. He was defeated by Deborah Frank Feinen.Nighthawk418 (talk) 02:26, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

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• Don Gerard, Mayor of the City of Champaign, Illinois.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 09:44, 23 January 2021 (UTC)