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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. (non-admin closure) Juliette Han (talk) 13:44, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The closure was overturned at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2020 July 5 and replaced by a closure of no consensus. Stifle (talk) 08:32, 13 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Jo Rae Perkins

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Jo Rae Perkins (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Fails WP:GNG and WP:NPOL. A candidate nominated for office by a party does not meet NPOL. This candidate did get a little bit of outsized attention due to her embrace of QAnon, but 24 hours later she walked it back. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:51, 23 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:51, 23 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Oregon-related deletion discussions. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:51, 23 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Muboshgu, would you be willing to comment based on the additional sourcing that was found, and has either been integrated into the article or is collected on the talk page? There has been quite regular local coverage throughout her entire political career (since at least ~2010), and this coverage expanded to the state level during the 2016/2018 elections and more recently to the national level with her primary win. For this reason, the subject seems to easily pass BASIC. Is there a reason that standard wouldn't apply? Am I misinterpreting the BASIC standard? Thanks for your thoughts--I'm fairly new to deletion discussions, and so a fuller discussion would be useful in helping me evaluate this sort of thing in the future. Jlevi (talk) 21:50, 23 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Jlevi, I think you have done an admirable job in expanding this article. We disagree about the notability in this case, though. A lot of the sources in the article, like this one, aren't about her in a significant fashion. – Muboshgu (talk) 19:07, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to 2020 United States Senate election in Oregon as a usual and appropriate outcome for candidates running for U.S. Senate. No prejudice against recreation if the subject wins in November or if there is sustained international/national coverage of the subject's embrace of QAnon, which would push her to the Christine O'Donnell territory of notability. --Enos733 (talk) 21:09, 23 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to 2020 United States Senate election in Oregon, there is significant coverage not in local media, but that coverage mostly just seems to be a brief flurry around her being an insane conspiracy theorist, meaning that she fails WP:BLP1E. There is no indication that it will be lasting. If she continues to get coverage to the same degree she has recently, the article can always be recreated. Also, the nominating statement is incorrect, she did not walk back her comments and is still clearly a QAnon cultist. Devonian Wombat (talk) 00:54, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. If this needs to be revisited in a year or two, fine. But she made national attention for her beliefs. Definitely more than the average losing Senate candidate will get. I also don't really agree with the deletion of losing candidate articles in the first place - all it does is remove a valuable source of information for politics geeks like myself. Kingofthedead (talk) 01:15, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    " If this needs to be revisited in a year or two, fine." Notability is not temporary. She's notable now, or she isn't. – Muboshgu (talk) 19:15, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Muboshgu, your point is the exact reason we have the political test we have, especially for fresh candidates, who often pop up, run, lose, and then slink back into obscurity. I still don't see any reason why this can't be a redirect to the election page just because the election has generated coverage, especially because this is a particularly US-centric problem. SportingFlyer T·C 17:19, 2 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Two years ago I created an article for Steve Watkins who had narrowly won the Republican congressional primary in KS-2. He had considerably more notability and vastly more campaign funding than perennial Oregon candidate Perkins, but the article about him was deleted. After Watkins narrowly won the general election, a new article was created with considerably less reliably sourced material. The article here contains numerous errors of fact, and it's not worth fixing. There's absolutely nothing notable about Perkins. Many others hold to the same conspiracy theory that she does, although they are more than those who claim they were abducted by space aliens. She got about 175,00 votes running against other nobodies in the U.S. Senate primary, a statewide race of course, up from the less-than-3% she got in the 2014 Senate primary. Only about 330,000 total votes were cast in the 2020 Republican primary for the nomination. In another simultaneous statewide primary, the Oregon Democratic 2020 presidential primary, had about 600,000 voters cast ballots and about the same in the hotly contested Democratic race for Secretary of State.[1] Merkley, the uncontested nominee for reelection in 2020, is immensely popular. He won the 2014 contest by about 250,000 votes. Perkins will cascade back into obscurity on November 3rd. Activist (talk) 08:11, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep per Jlevi and Kingofthedead. Iamreallygoodatcheckers (talk) 11:33, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per WP:NOTNEWS, without prejudice against recreation in the future if circumstances change. As always, candidates are not automatically entitled to keep Wikipedia articles just for standing as candidates — and the test that makes one particular candidate more special than other candidates is not just the ability to show that extralocal coverage has started to exist, it is that the extralocal coverage has exploded to the point that she already passes the ten year test for enduring significance.
    Basically, the way to demonstrate that a candidate is a special case who deserves an article just for being a candidate is to perform the following thought experiment: assume that she loses the election, and then dies the very next day so that she never has any chance to accomplish anything more notable than running for office and losing. Then ask yourself the question, "given those assumptions, has her candidacy already made her so highly famous that she will still be a household name in 2030?" If you can't convincingly answer "yes" to that question, then what you have is not a candidate who has become permanently notable, but a temporarily newsy WP:BLP1E. Bearcat (talk) 15:11, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • It’s interesting to draw the line there. Is Vivian Davis Figures or Roxanne Conlin still a household name? Not really, no. And honestly very very few people in politics are big enough that they’ll still be talked about a lot outside their home state in 10 years. State representatives are often pretty anonymous yet they still get an article by default while someone who’s a major party candidate for a very high office who’s received a lot of national media attention isn’t? I just don’t quite get the rationale here. Kingofthedead (talk) 19:11, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      Kingofthedead, Vivian Davis Figures is a former current state legislator. Roxanne Conlin is a former U.S. Attorney. Both of those positions meet WP:NPOL. Perkins was a county party chair. That is not covered in NPOL. – Muboshgu (talk) 19:12, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      You're raising actual NPOL-passing officeholders as evidence that our position on unelected candidates is somehow unreasonable? One of these things is not like the others, as they used to sing on Sesame Street. Bearcat (talk) 22:06, 26 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong keep. WP:NOTNEWS isn't a reason to delete the article. The point of NOTNEWS can be summed up by this: "However, not all verifiable events are suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia." Or, in other words, judgment is required. So let's use judgment here. Perkins isn't just a "candidate" for a local office or even for a Congressional seat. She is the nominated candidate (having won a contested primary) of a major U.S. political party for the office of United States Senator. And if you do a Google search on her name, restricted to news sites, there are 14,500 results; she is getting huge media coverage. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:54, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    John Broughton, She is the nominated candidate (having won a contested primary) of a major U.S. political party for the office of United States Senator. That still fails NPOL. And see WP:GHITS as well. This is the coverage a candidate for office gets, and candidates are not notable for being candidates. – Muboshgu (talk) 19:06, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Muboshgu,WP:GHITS is an essay. And even that says "... searches using Google's specialty tools, such as Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google News, are more likely to return reliable sources that can be useful in improving articles than the default Google web search." That's why I used a Google News search rather than searching all of the web. As for WP:NPOL, that includes this: "The following are presumed to be notable: ... Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage." Perkins has received significant press coverage. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:21, 26 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • Every candidate in every election can always claim to have received "significant press coverage" for the purposes of claiming that they pass WP:GNG and are therefore "exempted" from having to pass NPOL. So the test that an unelected candidate has to pass to get a Wikipedia article is not just "does press coverage of the campaign exist?" — it is "since every candidate can always show some evidence of press coverage without necessarily being of enduring public interest, does this candidate's press coverage establish her as much more special than every other candidate, in some way that passes the ten year test for enduring significance?" Bearcat (talk) 22:04, 26 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete not enough substantive coverage to justify an article.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:36, 26 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • She's got substantive coverage from NY Times, CNN, National Review, even foreign sources such as The Guardian. And not to mention countless amounts of local coverage. Not sure how you can justify that. Kingofthedead (talk) 06:50, 27 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • The test that a candidate has to clear, in order to earn a special exemption from our normal consensus on the non-notability of candidates, is not "does coverage of the candidacy exist" — every candidate in every election can always answer that question in the affirmative, so our normal consensus would be inherently meaningless if the existence of campaign coverage were all it took to get a candidate around it. Rather, the question that has to be answered is "does her coverage demonstrate a credible reason to believe that people will still care about this in 2030?" — and a reason to answer that question in the affirmative has yet to be shown. Bearcat (talk) 17:11, 2 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep passes GNG WP:BASIC. As per policy, additional NPOL considerations not applicable.Djflem (talk) 16:20, 27 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to the senate race article - if she loses, she's not notable, which violates our theory of notability and WP:BLP1E. SportingFlyer T·C 07:13, 28 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Black Kite (talk) 00:36, 2 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Her party's nominee for a major election" is not a notability claim that gets a person into Wikipedia. The notability test at WP:NPOL is holding a notable office, not just running for one — even presidential candidates aren't exempted from having to satisfy NPOL just because they happen to be candidates. Bearcat (talk) 17:04, 2 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
not sure your obsession with AfDing articles for nominees especially ones that have received enough national attention. People are gonna want to know who Jo Rae Perkins is. Deleting this article just removes a very valuable resource for them. Kingofthedead (talk) 21:05, 2 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's not our job to be a "resource" database of every single person whose name happens to pop up in the current news cycle — we even have a rule that explicitly says we are WP:NOTNEWS. Our job is to look past the daily news and figure out what information people are still going to need ten years from now. Literally every candidate in every election everywhere can always show campaign coverage, and thus claim that he or she passes GNG and is thus exempted from actually having to pass NPOL — so if that were how it worked, NPOL itself would be inherently meaningless, we would always have to keep an article about every single person who was ever a candidate for any political office regardless of whether they won or lost, and then we're not an encyclopedia anymore but just a worthless advertorial database of campaign brochures for unsuccessful candidates. So the test for whether or not a candidate warrants an article just for being a candidate is not "does she have campaign coverage in the here and now?" — it is "will anything we can write about her right now still matter to anybody in 2030?" Bearcat (talk) 21:20, 2 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A couple responses - first, there is a lot of value assumptions in "her party's nominee for a major election" that our community has frequently rejected. It is not our role to attempt to define what is a "major election" or even a "major political party nominee." And, if the question is whether people want to know who a candidate is, there are other sources for that information (and importantly the basic information about a candidate for the U.S. Senate can always be incorporated into the page about the election (or perhaps at QAnon). The second concern about political candidates is that there is a tendency for the page to fall into a state of promotional material. This is often because editors are often supporters of the candidate (especially the less known they are) and can turn quickly into repositories of political positions or endorsements and may violate WP:NPOV, because there are few people watching the page to patrol against those violations of policy. --Enos733 (talk) 22:30, 2 June 2020 (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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