Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/British Public Party

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. Fram (talk) 14:45, 16 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

British Public Party[edit]

Contested prod. Local independent parliamentary candidate standing as a "party" - almost no votes, no assertion of notability, not even any references to prove it actually happened. Every UK election throws up many hundreds of such "parties" which have little to distinguish themselves from each other and very few voters who take any notice of them. Err... that's WP:NN. andy (talk) 21:08, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom. The Public Safety Democratic Monarchist White Resident party doesn't even have a redirect, and this - individual, I assume - is far less notable than the noble Commander. Tevildo (talk) 21:30, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- I didn't know about the Bill Boaks article although I was well aware of him, as any democrat should be. I'm grateful to you for the reference. :) andy (talk) 21:55, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - Bear in mind that Boaks regularly changed the order of the words in the title of his candidatures, and never claimed to have a party, so the situation is somewhat different. Warofdreams talk 23:33, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
~~Speedy Keep~~Delete. No assertion of notability? The table for the 2005 election results states, 'This table indicates those parties with over 500 votes nationwide', there are 60 parties in the table not hundreds. British Public Party got over 500 votes. Please see discussion regarding notability [1]. I don't think there are sources for any of the constituency results for the 2005 elections but I don't think we should delete all of them! Please see article Ilford South (UK Parliament constituency) for constituency the election relates to. Tom (talk) 21:58, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment. This doesn't address the substantive issues raised in WP:NOT. The (very limited) discussion about notability you refer to is simply about some people's ideas of how long a list should be, not about WP's concepts of notability. Tiny little "parties" are almost certain to fail the notability test so let's at least see some substantial local references to prove this party has some pretence to notability. If not, then it must have been a party that no-one came to! andy (talk) 22:09, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - One of WP's concept of notability must be about how long the list should be or the list would have been shortened no? You assert that the party is both 'tiny' and 'little', how little does the party have to be before it fails the notability test? To be consistent we could shorten the list to only parties that received a 1000 votes or more but some other editors may disagree. Tom (talk) 22:17, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - Number of votes recieved is not the criterion. That is, in fact, irrelevant. Wikipedia:Notability explains the criterion. Please read it. And the length of the list on the template has nothing to do with this discussion, which is about an article. Uncle G (talk) 22:25, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      - As I say above, the alternative would be to shorten the table to just those parties that have 1000 votes or more. We should also fairly apply the notability rational to all the other parties in the table and delete all those that don't have sources e.g. UK Community Issues Party, Local Community Party etc but this would seem overkill which is why I vote for speedy keep. Tom (talk) 22:39, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        We apply notability criteria fairly. That does not mean that either every party or no party gets an article. "If article X then article Y." is a fallacious argument, for obvious reasons. The primary criterion is multiple published works documenting the subject in depth from reliable and independent sources. Some parties satisfy that criterion, and get articles. Some do not, and warrant no more than lines in election results tables, because that is all that they have outside of Wikipedia. You do not seem to have fully understood "the length of the list on the template has nothing to do with this discussion", moreover. How was it unclear? You also have the wrong idea of what speedy keeping is about. Your rationale is not a speedy keep rationale in any way. Uncle G (talk) 23:53, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- That is not a valid rationale. It's not a rationale for speedy keeping, and AFD is not about assertions of notability. That's only what prevents certain classes of article from being speedily deleted. Here, at AFD, we decide whether things actually are notable. And no, as pointed out, that discussion isn't a discussion of notability. Here, we are discussing whether this subject warrants an article. And the criterion for that is whether this party has been documented in depth in multiple non-trivial published works from reliable and independent sources. That is what demonstrates notability, per Wikipedia:Notability. If the sole documentation for a party is a line in an election results table outside of Wikipedia (which are published, by the way, and which are sources for articles such as the one that you point to), then that is all that it should garner inside Wikipedia, and it doesn't warrant an article, merely a row in a table in an article such as Ilford South (UK Parliament constituency). So not only have you not made a valid speedy keep rationale, you haven't even addressed the subject of notability at all. Cite sources. Those are your arguments for notability. Boldfaced words and an invalid rationale aren't. Uncle G (talk) 22:25, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I've done my best to expand the article, but the only sources I've been able to find are lists of election results and the party's own website. The other Google hits appear to be discussions on forums where someone has asked a questions along the lines of "anyone heard of this lot?" I don't think that the bar for articles on political parties should be set too high - having one elected councillor will almost certainly generate enough references to ensure that the party can be considered notable (and I'd certainly consider that a good article could be written on the Local Community Party, which has a number of councillors, although the current article doesn't really demonstrate this). Some other parties may be notable for unusual views, activity in trade unions or specific campaigns, or any number of other areas. But if nobody outside the party has troubled themselves to write even one line of prose on the party's views, it's not notable. Just possibly, there might be sufficient evidence in the local press which hasn't made it online, but based on what I've been able to find, it has to be a sad delete vote. Warofdreams talk 23:33, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of United Kingdom-related deletion discussions. -- the wub "?!" 22:46, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. -- the wub "?!" 22:46, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment On the above discussion, I agree that the party should be on the _list_. I don't believe that it deserves its own _article_, especially not such a minimalistic one as we have at the moment. And this would apply to most of the parties at the bottom of the list, although a mass nomination probably isn't the way to go. Tevildo (talk) 23:28, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Bloody hell, that's the last time I work on the red link project :-( ,Tom walks away crying... Tom (talk) 23:47, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- People sometimes wikify list entries with wild abandon. That doesn't mean that every entry on the list is a subject that qualifies for an article. (This is most commonly a problem with lists of people and characters.) Uncle G (talk) 23:53, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, no evidence of notability. I don't have a problem with including its name on a list of political parties, but there's nothing here that makes it deserve its own article. Terraxos (talk) 03:12, 10 January 2008 (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.