Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Joshua Claybourn (2nd nomination)

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 Hopelessly Tainted by SPA and Canvassed votes. Lesson 1 don't canvass editors as it simply makes the process of weighting votes impossible. No objection to immediate renomination to get a clean discussion going. I will block anyone who canvasses a fresh nomination. Spartaz ^Humbug! 10:29, 29 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Joshua Claybourn

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I don't see enough evidence of notability here. Legal work is not notable. Book on Lincoln is not yet published. Citations mostly appear to be articles by the subject, or in one case a non-reliable source, the three-sentence Hewitt post. Was AfDed in 2005, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Joshua Claybourn, and decision was delete. Not sure whether it was in fact deleted and reinstated later. Tacyarg (talk) 02:11, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: The events in 2016 as a delegate justify notability (and occurred after the 2005 discussion), in addition to recent publication contract with a major university press.--IndyNotes (talk) 02:58, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete the events of 2016 are not enough to establish notability. Being a delegate to a party convention is not grounds for notability, resigning as a delegate for a party convention, is even less a sign of notability.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:24, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral comment IndyNotes notified around 30 users who had nothing to do with editing or working on this article or the previous AfD (from thirteen years ago) of this nom; I don't know if this is a WP:CANVASS or a bot gone wrong or what it is; please explain IndyNotes. Nate • (chatter) 04:39, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I did explain on your talk page. At some point you had commented and/or edited an article relating to the "Never Trump" movement and thus I thought you might be able to add input to the discussion. My apologies if I was in error.--IndyNotes (talk) 04:41, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Leaning keep. I agree with John Pack Lambert that being a delegate to a party convention is not grounds for notability, but I think that resigning as a delegate for a party convention can be, depending on the circumstances. Resigning due to illness or a some low-level personal scandal, for example would obviously not cut it. Resigning in public protest of the nominee of your party, I would say, is a far more likely indicator of notability. bd2412 T 05:14, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. Hhhhhkohhhhh (talk) 07:34, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. Hhhhhkohhhhh (talk) 07:34, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Hhhhhkohhhhh (talk) 07:34, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Hhhhhkohhhhh (talk) 07:34, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. Hhhhhkohhhhh (talk) 07:34, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. Hhhhhkohhhhh (talk) 07:34, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

~~weak keep~~, as for bd2412, because of resigning in protest over Biff. Also note that I'm unimpressed by the obvious CANVASSing. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:45, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't appreciate being summoned here by a template that is meant to be used for the article creator.^diff This subject is vaguely of interest to me and the article creator is anonymous. I am inclined to recommend it being kept, because there are sources, and the political aspect of this subject is minor and not the main claim for significance. But I won't put this in bold because of the WP:CANVASS policy. Regards. Ilyina Olya Yakovna (talk) 10:57, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I notified some editors who had voted on other AfD discussions for political or author-related articles per Wikipedia:Canvassing#Appropriate_notification. I tried to get an even split of people who had voted for both deleting and keeping articles. --IndyNotes (talk) 18:13, 28 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Not sure why I was notified, but this clearly looks like a vanity page on a not-really-notable individual. john k (talk) 14:14, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete -- I do not think his historical work is sufficient to make him notable. Peterkingiron (talk) 00:43, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Strong keep: Aside from Mr. Claybourn's published work, status as a Delegate, and his other notable characteristics, Josh was a key figure in the early Blogosphere. His main weblog was one of the most influential, read, and commented at, and he was also a major contributor to other weblogs. He had a major role in the Blogosphere, almost from its beginning. He has since achieved success, in many other ways. Pacificus (talk) 01:25, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What sort of date for his blog? He's described here as "the next generation of bloggers" and I can't see him as an early blogger - he'd have to have started whilst still at school. Also the ref given for this is a trivial one para mention of five bloggers, with no description of each. Also the blog linked there is dead, now some sort of Thai spam page. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:40, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Andy Dingley's implication that the blogging background is a relatively weak basis for this article. However, it's a supportive data point for other more significant justifications.--IndyNotes (talk) 16:53, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK then, you've swayed me. In which case, delete. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:29, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: This article's deficiency lies with its weak introduction. That needs to be fleshed out more. The authorship history is of minor significance but when taken together with the notable and high profile resignation as a delegate (covered extensively in the New York Times and CNN, among others), it makes this an easy determination.--YHoshua (talk) 15:41, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: apologies if this is not in line with protocol, but YHoshua, do you have a conflict of interest? Your talk page says you run the website for the Claybourn family, and that link says that the site is run by Joshua Claybourn, who is the subject of this article. Tacyarg (talk) 22:46, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - I was not able to locate sufficient secondary biographical sources to establish notability. Magnolia677 (talk) 04:12, 23 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: In relation to the issue of the significance of his resignation as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, it would probably be helpful to keep in mind that the reason that he gave for doing so (and this is also why it was national news) was that he could not in good conscience cast a vote for Donald Trump. Opposition to Trump within the GOP even once he had secured the 2016 Republican nomination was a significant aspect of the 2016 United States presidential campaign, and so were the causes of that opposition to the person who now, as you know, has become the President of the United States. Joshua Claybourn's resignation as a delegate was important enough either as evidence of that opposition or as a symbol of it that major national news outlets in the U.S. reported it. If the article needs more citations in order to adequately demonstrate this, I can provide them, though I did not think that they were difficult to find. It is probably also worth mentioning that my search (using Google) turned up articles not just from major U.S. news outlets but also from a couple of foreign ones. Since my familiarity with foreign news publications printed in foreign languages is limited, I looked them up here on Wikipedia to get a sense of whether these two are credible, well-established publications, and my impression was that they are. For anyone who wants to double-check, the publications are the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and FOCUS. Both of the publications are German (and printed in the German language), and both mention Claybourn's resignation as a delegate and include a quote from him (though the quote has been translated into German). As far as I know, Wikipedia does not have a hard rule on this point, but I think that the fact that two German news outlets thought his resignation significant enough to report at all in Germany (and to quote him) is useful as at least a rough indicator of significance. I would not normally expect a major German newspaper and a major German news magazine to take notice of what some American did while present in the United States unless they, in their judgment as secondary sources, considered what he did to be noteworthy and thought that their readers might actually care about it. I do not mean to suggest that his resignation was the story of the year, but while I do not think this coverage of it would justify a new Joshua Claybourn article on the German-language (or "Deutsch") Wikipedia, it does justify keeping this article on the English-language Wikipedia. Duodecimus (talk) 06:32, 23 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I had just the same opinion myself - "I could not in good conscience cast a vote for Donald Trump". It's not an unusual opinion. Now, here's the nub - was his role as a delegate to this conference sufficient for that opinion to be notable? Now I think a senatorial candidate taking that line would have been; I know no-one gives a damn what I think of Trump, but where does a conference delegate stand between those two points? Are they even a delegate in a strict sense? (this term gets stretched every which way). Is such a conference 'delegate' expected to represent a mandate they've already been given (a literal delegate, although it's rarely used that way) or were they there instead as a representative, and expected instead to use their own best judgement? The first of these, and being unable to do so from conscience, is a much stronger statement of disagreement than that of a representative who has already been told to make their own choice. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:35, 23 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am pretty sure that he would have been required to cast his vote for Trump on the first ballot at the convention, and if a nominee had not been successfully chosen on the first ballot, he might have been able to use his own judgment on a second or any subsequent ballot. That was my impression from reading about it at the time, but I think that at least one of the articles that I looked at last night also said that. I'll try to find one (maybe a few) and link to it here. It would make sense that a delegate would be bound in casting the first ballot, though, because now-President Trump did win the Indiana Republican primary in May 2016 (I am from Indiana, so I remember that vividly, though as infrequently as I can manage), and that primary would not have served any obvious purpose if delegates for the state were not obligated to vote for its winner on at least the first ballot at the convention. I'll Google up a source or two now, though, since those ought to have more weight than my own reasoning and my own memory of things. Duodecimus (talk) 01:44, 24 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There may be better articles than this (ones that more directly state that Claybourn would have been required to vote for Trump on the first ballot and that the possibility of a second ballot had been eliminated due to the number of delegates Trump had managed to win in the primaries up to that point), but here are three of them: First, one from the New Yorker, one from the Daily Caller, and one from the Indianapolis Star. Duodecimus (talk) 02:35, 24 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This Indianapolis Star article is a different one than the one to which I linked before. This one does not actually mention Claybourn, but it does provide additional information about in what sense of the word "delegate" he was to be a delegate to the Republican National Convention (before his resignation of that position). It may be helpful in settling the question of what the position that Joshua Claybourn resigned actually was and why his unwillingness to cast a vote for Mr. Trump made it necessary for him to resign that position. That is important to know in order to understand why his resignation drew the attention of national and even international news organizations. Duodecimus (talk) 04:42, 24 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: Clayborn made national news for his decision regarding being a delegate. Additionally, its only cited in passing, but he has been a writer for Howey Politics one of the largest non-partisan political website in Indiana. Iufoltzie (talk) 04:39, 24 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

— Note: An editor has expressed a concern that editors have been canvassed to this discussion. Hhhhhkohhhhh (talk) 16:15, 23 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I notified some editors who had voted on other AfD discussions for political or author-related articles per Wikipedia:Canvassing#Appropriate_notification. I tried to get an even split of people who had voted for both deleting and keeping articles. --IndyNotes (talk) 18:13, 28 January 2018 (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.