Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2007 Komae city assembly election

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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. I'm closing this discussion as "Delete". I was persuaded by those arguing that this was a local event and, to be honest, I've deleted plenty of articles on local elections in Western countries. I'm also influenced by the fact that despite claims, no further editing has occurred on this article since this nomination. If sources were out there to support notabilty, I think they would have been located over the past 3 weeks that this AFD has been open. Liz Read! Talk! 00:59, 21 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

2007 Komae city assembly election[edit]

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2007 Komae city assembly election (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Lists aside, this article consists of one (1) sentence, of ten words. I don't question either that Komae-shi (a western suburb of Tokyo) exists, or that it held an election in 2007; however, there's no indication that the election wasn't utterly routine, and Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. -- Hoary (talk) 21:46, 25 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

よ！ Dekimasu, I'm willing to believe that one or more among 2007 Komae city assembly election, 1909 Forfarshire by-election or 1945 Fremantle by-election and 1984 Anchorage mayoral election was not humdrum, whether because it had lasting consequences or for some other reason. None of the four stubs suggests to me that the election was anything but humdrum. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information that's humdrum but that later could conceivably be shown to deviate from the humdrum in some way. Perhaps elections are a little like actors: there are huge numbers of the latter, and those who are still emerging don't get articles on the strength of their looks or the fervidness of their (few) proponents; rather, we wait till their notability is clearly apparent. -- Hoary (talk) 06:30, 28 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The closest page to the AfD’d page in Japanese, leaving a link to the AfD’d page for more information. I am pretty sure these minor elections usually belongs in Japanese Wikipedias as it may be more “notable”? Overall Agreeing to the deletion if it ever happens, most likely not the thing to make an independent page about. Sorry for the crappy grammar, but I hope you can somehow understand what I am trying to point out. AlphaBetaGammsh (talk) 06:03, 31 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: Elections are inherently notable in nature, and as pointed out by @Dekimasu, english speaking countries have plenty of similar articles. There's a collection of results here already, and perhaps in the future the article will be further improved by the providence of related context. However until that point, users on Wikipedia will in the mean time be able to readily access results that would be otherwise (relatively) inaccessible. It's useful to keep the article in it's base form, IMO. Alexcs114 (talk) 16:22, 1 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Star Mississippi 02:08, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep - while there could be circumstances where we may not want to assume notability of an election (e.g. historical elections that may not have actually taken place, potentially sham elections during conditions of political instability in regions with no independent press etc.) but none of those apply here. signed, Rosguill talk 03:07, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I'll quote the article Tokyo: "Since 2001, Tokyo consists of 62 municipalities: 23 special wards, 26 cities, 5 towns and 8 villages." Komae is one of the "cities". Pleasant though they are, the "towns" and "villages" have minor population or other significance; let's say that Komae is not one sixty-second but instead all of one fiftieth of Tokyo. (Actually its population is just 2.2 thousandths of that of Tokyo.) It is of course imaginable that what was expected to be a humdrum election instead had remarkable significance (an upset for the overly complacent incumbent, launching or terminating a remarkable political career, Santos-scale fraudulence, etc). But none has been asserted for this election. The article 2007 Japanese unified local elections (feeble, but on a subject whose notability I don't question) mentions a lot of the individual elections; but my browser (Firefox) finds no appearance within it of the string Komae. For that matter, despite its considerable bulk, the article ja:第16回統一地方選挙 (the Japanese-language equivalent of 2007 Japanese unified local elections) doesn't mention 狛江 (Komae). The article 2007 Komae city assembly election is very little more than an assemblage of lists of names; none of these names is blue-linked. Alexcs114 writes: "perhaps in the future the article will be further improved by the providence of related context". Yes, perhaps it will! Rather as it may be discovered that a teapot is orbiting the Sun. -- Hoary (talk) 23:30, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    WP:AQU, it is a fact that the article may be improved. Many of our best articles once looked like stubs such as this before being improved by caring editors. Alexcs114 (talk) 23:47, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Alexcs114, it's a fact that ... all sorts of things may be such-and-such. (It's a fact that George Santos may be a decent, upstanding, but serially/tragically misunderstood fellow, et cetera et cetera.) Perhaps I'm an uncaring editor, but I do flatter myself that I'm at least open-minded. Would you or Rosguill (or anyone) care to make one or two tiny edits to this article, suggesting that the election didn't merely have the potential for significance but actually did have some significance? -- Hoary (talk) 01:53, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I will improve the article tommorow if/when I find the time, though I've got a lot going on tommorow IRL and am not the best educated on Japanese elections.
    That being said:
    I wasn't trying to suggest that the article had potential for significance - I believe any election (including this one) is significant in it's own right, though that may not be the most widely accepted view on wikipedia. After all, why can't we house and readily provide data on election results for all parts of the world irregardless of size? Such things are the foundational structure of many governments, and having free and easy access to them is important. It's often hard to find historical results for local elections, having them readily available on wikipedia is a net plus - but rather that the article had potential for improvement.
    With regard to the significance issue, if the page remains a stub, maybe the page could be merged into a subcategory on Komae, Tokyo for election results? Alexcs114 (talk) 02:09, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I was actually going to add some stuff to the article today, but I can't read Japanese and couldn't find any english sources - any advice on that? You seem to be a far more experienced editor than I, lol Alexcs114 (talk) 02:13, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't understand the notion of merging into a subcategory on/of an article; and suppose that it's the result of some kind of typo. Category:Komae, Tokyo does exist, but (unsurprisingly) it's very sparse: it has only one subcategory (Category:People from Komae, Tokyo), and no article such as "Electoral history of Komae, Tokyo". The article under discussion is the sole article devoted to a Komae election. (If it's of interest, ja:Category:狛江市 has more subcategories, but, whether subcategory or article, nothing covering this.) -- Hoary (talk) 02:33, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    meant subcategory to mean "paragraph of an article", not a literal category. Like, the main Komae, Tokyoarticle could perhaps have this article merged into it? On second thought though, that could bulk up the article unnecessarily. Alexcs114 (talk) 12:43, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep as an election of a municipality with over 80,000 residents, this has inherent notability. Fulmard (talk) 20:09, 3 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question I don't see anything about the inherent notability of elections in either WP:N or Wikipedia:Notability (events)]. What am I missing? Comment If a local election has "inherent notability", then I'd imagine that its successors have as well. But nobody has bothered to write up any of these, either in en:WP or in ja:WP. Is anyone here volunteering to do so? Here's a list of links to info about Komae's elections. An example is this one, of 2019. People interested can look there. Of course, that website may disappear; but the Wayback Machine has the page. Yes, both the website and the Wayback Machine may disappear: I'd then look in the archives of one or other of the national/Tokyo newspapers. -- Hoary (talk) 01:46, 5 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Low-level municipal elections are not presumed notable, and I'm honestly a bit surprised to see editors I respect arguing that. The relevant guideline, WP:NEVENT, calls for coverage that's both geographically and temporally broad; no one has been able to find anything approaching that level of sourcing, and my search came up empty. Wikipedia is not a newspaper or a database for election results. And I'm not convinced that applying these policies and guidelines would present a systemic-bias issue: when articles about comparable local-level elections in the West appear at AfD, the result is usually delete, and often quite uncontroversially ([1], [2], and [3] are a few I've !voted in). Extraordinary Writ (talk) 22:47, 10 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete. The election could indeed be notable, but at present there's no evidence that it is. The problem is the article's lack of context — it is basically data without encyclopedic content. Reliable sources need to be found and added which comment on the election either before and/or after the results. The problem is that sources will more than likely be in Japanese and not readily found by most of us contributing our opinions here. 16 years have elapsed without any context being added so I take on board the nominator's point it appears unlikely any will be. Also, this article seems to be a one-off i.e. not part of a series of such elections. Articles on more recent elections have either not been created or have been subsequently deleted. Rupples (talk) 03:52, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Discussion of whether there is or is not a substantial quantity of reliable source material available about this subject would be very helpful in determining the outcome.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Seraphimblade Talk to me 00:09, 14 June 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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