Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/St. Martin's Cathedral (Gander)

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. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:14, 19 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

St. Martin's Cathedral (Gander)[edit]

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Minimal sourcing and I am not sure it meets WP:GNG; also see WP:NOTDIRECTORY and WP:NCHURCH---IMR2000 (talk) 04:26, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep While there's not an explicit policy wherein the cathedrals of major denominations get a free pass to notability, I would argue that there is a degree of congruence with WP:NBISHOP; this WP Religion guide disagrees. In any case, I have initiated the introduction of sources not easily accessible on the open web. This is very obviously not a failure to WP:BEFORE as there is not the expectation any given editor has access to a newspaper archive and the sources therein need to be further combed to ensure significant coverage. ~ Pbritti (talk) 05:31, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Unrelated: getting a ton of annoying false-positives where the scans read "Matins" as "Martin's". ~ Pbritti (talk) 05:59, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Architecture, Christianity, and Canada. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 10:05, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - while it certainly doesn’t rival Reims, [1], I tend to agree that it being the cathedral of a diocese implies notability. And further sources can be found online, although admittedly not many. KJP1 (talk) 11:45, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep. It's a problem that we have so little coverage of this church that we don't know when it was built etc. I have access to newspapers.com, the Wikipedia library (of course), and a Canadian academic theological library, and I can't find anything significant about the church other than its verifiable existence and its role in the 1985 memorial service. All the same I am confident that there would have been at least local coverage of the building and commissioning, but that these sources simply aren't accessible online. Having said all of that, I think the topic is notable and just about squeaks by based on the current sourcing. Thparkth (talk) 13:47, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly Keep -- Cathedrals of the Anglican Communion, in countries where that is the dominant church are notable without more. This is technically a pro-cathedral, a church that has been promoted to cathedral status. It probably became one in 1976, when the diocese of Newfoundland was divided, so that an additional Cathedral was needed. I would have liked to have seen a few sentences as to when the church was built and when it became a cathedral, but that is a matter where improvement is needed; certainly not deletion. Peterkingiron (talk) 18:28, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as per the multiple reliable sources references that have been added to the article since nomination so that deletion is unnecessary in my view, Atlantic306 (talk) 20:00, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Cathedrals of major denominations have always been considered to be notable. And if you actually read WP:NCHURCH you'll discover that it doesn't apply to buildings. -- Necrothesp (talk) 20:54, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: Article has now been improved to the point where the nomination can likely be withdrawn.--IMR2000 (talk) 21:00, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@IMR2000: I appreciate you raising this for AfD. This was an article produced by a somewhat notorious hypercontributor who left literally thousands of inaccurate and subpar stub creations in his wake. Your AfD helped move the article to that point that someone looking for information on this cathedral can turn to Wikipedia. ~ Pbritti (talk) 23:44, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

leaning delete First off, this building is not a cathedral. It is a "pro-cathedral", which is to say, a parish church used as if it were the cathedral. I'm dubious about an automatic notability pass for cathedrals anyway because our image of a Gothic or Baroque pile with a few centuries of history is pretty misleading once one gets away from Europe. I found nothing discussing this as a building, and the various events listed in the article are largely routine episcopal acts that could happen wherever convenient. Mangoe (talk) 17:27, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Since I'm the only one that seems to be adding anything to the article, I'll chime in to say that you're right that much of the information—especially the final paragraph—is fairly typical episcopal matters that contribute little if any to the sourcing and coverage needs of GNG. However, there are two issues with your position. The first is that a pro-cathedral in this context refers to a church that was a parish and is now a cathedral, albeit one not purpose-built. Some sources describe St. Martin's as simply a cathedral, so I tend towards viewing the purposes of the structure as being of equal utility to other cathedrals. This only lends it some basic notability that, according to GNG, would require independent extensive coverage to merit inclusion on Wikipedia. We have that, if only barely, through several news articles mostly from two events in 1985. ~ Pbritti (talk) 19:05, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Also, it should be noted that parochial ecclesiological nomenclature is a frustrating affair; in this case, the cathedral's parish incorporates both the cathedral itself and a chapel elsewhere in Gander (see here). ~ Pbritti (talk) 19:09, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - The article has been signficiantly improved and is a far cry from the version that was nominated. It certainly seems to meet WP:GNG and as Necrothesp pointed out, WP:NCHURCH is about "church" as an organization and is not about the physical building; those are two distinct entities. The building appears to meet notability guidelines. - Aoidh (talk) 17:41, 16 November 2022 (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.