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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 delete. Sandstein 21:03, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

2021 Salisbury City Council election[edit]

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2021 Salisbury City Council election (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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This is an election to a parish council, the lowest level of local government in England. I don't believe this is a notable level of election.

The article was prodded, but the prod was removed with the edit summary "there is surely a fundamental mistake in the idea of “a notable level of local authority”, any subject can be notable if it complies with WP:N". The deprodder has confused notability of the local authority itself (no-one is proposing to delete Salisbury City Council) with elections to the body.

Also nominating these articles for the same reason:

Cheers, Number 57 14:17, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    • P.S. There is a whole template Template:Wiltshire elections of similar borougn/district elections to dlete. Lokys dar Vienas (talk) 20:04, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • All the elections on that template (except for the Salisbury ones, which were only recently added) are for county/unitary/district council elections, which are higher levels than parish councils. Number 57 21:22, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Events, Politics, and England. Spiderone(Talk to Spiseder) 14:26, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Easily passes WP:GNG. Curntag (talk) 14:57, 28 December 2022 (UTC) — Curntag (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. Blocked sock[reply]
  • Delete per nom. The warding and results can be covered in the council's article. Wire723 (talk) 15:25, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Also, I fail to see the benefit of listing the candidates when not one of them (in any of the four tranches of elections) is a blue link. Having Wiltshire Council publish these lists is sufficient. Wire723 (talk) 18:22, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Wire723, on your last point, most local authorities take down all of the information within a few years. Try spot checking. On your first point, see below. On your middle point, the names are useful (and often significant) locally. You may feel that the political labels are more useful generally. Moonraker (talk) 05:29, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Unconvinced ... if Wiltshire Council don't think the details are worth preserving, and we agree notability of the people is purely local, that supports deletion of the articles. Certainly the politics of the elected town council is worth a mention in its article, although national parties are usually of low relevance in these community councils. Wire723 (talk) 11:19, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, agreed with nom. Merge this content as summation in council's article. — Moops ⋠T⋡ 19:22, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • summarize/redirect all election pages into the corresponding administrative entity articles. Lokys dar Vienas (talk) 20:04, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - By themselves elections to the equivalent of parish councils are not going to be notable enough for an article unless there is some other reason that alters this (eg substantial media coverage) and that does not seem to be the case here. Dunarc (talk) 00:05, 29 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep as Curntag says, “Easily passes WP:GNG”. These are very worthwhile articles for WikiProject Wiltshire. In reply to Dunarc, notability is not about importance, but even if it were, in this case what is technically a parish council is also the council of a historic city with a lot of functions and employees. The crunch question is whether Salisbury City Council is notable, and if it is we surely do not want to clutter up articles on councils with detailed information on all the elections they have had. They would be swamped. Moonraker (talk) 17:26, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I didn't bother to respond to Curntag, as they are an SPA posting seemingly random votes on AfDs. However, there is nothing in the 2021, 2017 or 2013 articles that evidences GNG; they all have a single reference, which is to the local authority that organised the elections (and therefore not independent). The 2009 election has eleven references, of which only one (the Salisbury Journal) is an independent source. Number 57 18:13, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The 2009 page may be better referenced because of your previous AfD on it, but you could make this argument about the vast majority of WP’s election pages. As I see it, Wiltshire Council is a primary source here, one which can be relied on for facts but not opinions. It only acts as a publisher, it does not organize the elections. The Returning Officer and his or her staff do that. Moonraker (talk) 19:18, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Not this nonsense again... The local authority does organise the elections – what do you think the Electoral Services team does? Number 57 19:28, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The Electoral Services team publishes the official notices, including the ones that elections will be held, and also the results afterwards. The Returning Officer drafts the various official notices and hires people to run the polling stations and the count. Most of those (but not all) are local authority employees. Moonraker (talk) 02:26, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know whether you are genuinely uninformed about this, or are trying to mislead other editors. Returning officers are officers of the council (almost always the council's Chief Executive in my experience). Here's Wiltshire Council's Chief Exec explaining "Every county or county borough council is required to appoint an officer of the council to be the Returning Officer..." And here is Wiltshire Council's delegation scheme confirming that the Chief Executive is the Returning Officer. Number 57 12:40, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Number 57, I am afraid you are mistaken. The local authority does not organize elections, even if the returning officer also works for it. See here what the Electoral Commission says: “As Returning Officer you play a central role in the democratic process… You are personally responsible for the conduct of the election... Your duties as Returning Officer are separate from your duties as a local government officer. As Returning officer you are not responsible to the council but are directly accountable to the courts as an independent statutory office holder.“ Frankly, no elected political body would be trusted to organize any election and not to meddle in it. The returning officer is paid separately for the election work, as are any staff he hires to help him, who can be anyone competent to do it. So my point stands, that in this case WC is only acting as a printer and publisher of someone else’s notices. The crunch is really that the documents come from the returning officer, who is absolutely independent from SCC. Moonraker (talk) 05:09, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
You still don't understand how local elections work (do you really think a single returning officer is able to organise an election without the council's Electoral Services team doing all the work?), but thanks for confirming that "the documents come from the returning officer" and so are not from an independent source, and don't contribute to WP:GNG. Number 57 09:17, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
As it happens, Number 57, Hroðulf and Graemp are retired, and Jaguar hasn’t edited for months. But their points are still good. I see no one making any ethnic complaints in that discussion, it’s about notability. Do you agree, by the way, that Salisbury City Council is a notable subject? Moonraker (talk) 18:30, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps you missed the bit where an editor said "The perspective of an editor specialising in USA subject matter, is going to be less useful". And no-one is disputing the notability of the city council. The question here is whether elections to it are notable or not. Number 57 18:33, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, Number 57, glad to hear we agree that the council itself is notable. But it is an elected body, so hard to see how anyone could argue that the elections to it are non-notable: they are an inherent aspect of such a body, the only question is whether the election coverage should all sit on the main page, as I think you are suggesting, or whether it is better on sub-pages like these ones. So far as I can see, this is the pattern used by all other elected bodies, so there is nothing unusual here. That leads back to the point about clutter that I made above. Moonraker (talk) 19:01, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That discussion was seven years ago. As you know, our guidelines have become considerably more strict since then. Also, while I can see the notification to Moondragon21 being plausibly not canvassing as they are a local and may have local expertise, the ping to other previous participants who agreed with you while not pinging the participant who disagreed is highly inappropriate. Curbon7 (talk) 22:30, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Curbon7, I haven’t yet complained that I was not notified as the creator of the first of these pages. Perhaps we can just concentrate on the issues. When you say guidelines have become more strict since 2015, please do say what has changed and which policy guidelines you are referring to. Perhaps Wikipedia:WikiProject Elections and Referendums has something helpful, but I am quite sure it does not support all details of elections appearing in the main page for the elected body. Moonraker (talk) 01:06, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - The fundamental question is whether these articles pass the general notability guideline. The importance or notability of Salisbury City Council is not relevant to this question, since notability is not inherited. So far, all but the 2009 election articles have a single source provided, thus not meeting the requirement for multiple reliable sources. The 2009 election article has additional sources, all but one of which are from returning officers. There has been a debate about whether these sources count as independent - to my mind, the close involvement of the council and returning officers in the running of these elections (regardless of the specific details about precisely how these elections are run) would indicate that these are not independent sources. Further - and regardless of whether one agrees with me about independence - these sources are all (as Moonraker points out) primary sources. Point 5 in WP:PRIMARY says Do not base an entire article on primary sources, and be cautious about basing large passages on them. This would rule out the 2021, 2017, and 2013 articles - which at present have no additional sources - and would potentially rule out the 2009 article if the other sources are found not to be sufficient to establish notability. On top of all of this, WP:ROUTINE (based on WP:NOTNEWSPAPER) says routine news coverage of such things as announcements are not sufficient basis for an article. I would suggest that the Wiltshire Council and returning officer sources are routine, the kind of coverage we would expect from an election, and so cannot confer notability. (In fact, these are not even routine coverage since they are not news reports but part and parcel of the elections themselves.) The only other source is in the 2009 article, a news story from a local paper - this is both routine coverage (as mentioned above) and a local paper (reducing the significance of the coverage from the source). I cannot find any further sources myself on any of these elections, and therefore !vote delete for all four articles on the basis of failing GNG. WJ94 (talk) 16:11, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
On WP:INHERIT, WJ94, that says “Inherited notability is the idea that something qualifies for an article merely because it was associated with some other, legitimately notable subjects.” No doubt an election can comply with WP:N, but is it a runnable argument that elections to notable bodies can be non-notable? My point above is that elections to an elected body are an inherent aspect of the notable body itself. In other words, the GNG does not apply to them, only WP:Verifiability. Your logic seems to be that most elections can be covered in detail in (for instance) the Salisbury City Council or Wiltshire County Council pages, but sub-pages can’t be created to avoid clutter. I really think we need to see any policy that Wikipedia:WikiProject Elections and Referendums has on this. Do you know where it is? But the idea of non-notable elections to notable bodies should really be canvassed with that project.
On the rest, I follow your reasoning, but the same could be said about almost all WP pages on elections that are not national ones, and indeed about some on national elections. And however good the academic and media coverage is, in most cases the only sources that provide *all* the detailed information in them on the results are official primary sources, which can be relied on for facts. As you say, primary sources do not count for notability. Moonraker (talk) 19:20, 4 January 2023 (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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