Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Debbie Bath-Hadden

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. Daniel (talk) 04:43, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Debbie Bath-Hadden[edit]

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Biography of a person notable only as mayor of a small town, not properly referenced as passing WP:NPOL #2. As always, mayors are not all automatically notable just because they exist, or because you can show a small handful of local coverage in the local media where coverage of local mayors is simply expected to exist -- the notability test for mayors hinges on the ability to write a substantial article about her political significance, delving into well-sourced detail about specific things she accomplished in the job, and not just on the ability to minimally verify that she existed. But the sources here are a single article in the local community weekly about her initial election as mayor in 2018, and a three-article blip of "mayor dies" in the local media within the past 24 hours. Making a small-town mayor notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia takes a lot more than this: more substance than this, more detail than this, more sourcing than this. Bearcat (talk) 15:06, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 15:06, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 15:06, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Weak keep. Obits in Global News and the Star: [1], [2]. The Star one is republished from a Brock newspaper, but it's still in the Star. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 15:19, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It takes more than just the existence of a handful of obituaries in the local media, where obituaries of local mayors are simply expected to exist, to make a smalltown mayor notable. We would need a substantial amount of ongoing career coverage while she was alive, not just a brief WP:BIO1E blip of "mayor dies", to deem her notable enough. Bearcat (talk) 15:24, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

They're not local media, as I said. One is in the Toronto Star, and the other was published by Global News. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 15:26, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Brock is a suburb of Toronto inside the Toronto Star's local coverage area, and the Global News hit is from Global's local news bureau in Toronto (i.e. CIII-DT), not from the network's national news division. So yes, they are local media — and even if they did count for more, they still wouldn't count for enough all by themselves, because they still fail the "ongoing career coverage that enables us to write a genuinely substantial article about her political significance" test. Bearcat (talk) 15:31, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I guess we'll have to disagree about the precise scope of local media. I happen to think that an obit in Canada's largest newspaper and a national TV channel is not local coverage, and I see no evidence that the Global News obit is marked as being from a local affiliate specifically. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 15:36, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Even if we did accept them as more than local, that still wouldn't change anything.

Firstly, just because the Toronto Star reprints an obituary from a local community weekly in Toronto's suburbs that's owned by the Toronto Star, is not in and of itself an automatic free pass over WP:GNG that exempts her from having to have had any substantive career coverage while she was alive. The Toronto Star has given one-shot coverage to a lot of people over the years without giving them all instant notability freebies that exempted them from having to actually pass a notability criterion just because their name had been in the Toronto Star once. The Toronto Star can, and does, still cover people in local interest contexts that don't make the person permanently notable just because their name has appeared in the Toronto Star: local restaurant reviews, human interest coverage of people with disabilities, high school athletes, suburban municipal councillors, and on and so forth. We don't just hand people an automatic inclusion freebie just because the article has the words Toronto Star in it: we look at the context of what the sources are covering the person for, not just the raw number of footnotes that the article happens to have.

Secondly, the My Kawartha hit is the same article as the Toronto Star hit. Please read WP:CITEKILL, in particular the section headlined "Reprints": if the same article gets reaggregated by another media outlet, they don't count as two separate data points toward establishing notability, but rather they combine as one data point. We only care about which media outlet originated the content, not which other media outlets reprinted it later on.

Thirdly, if you click on Brittany Rosen, the bylined author of the Global News piece, her staff profile clearly identifies her as Global Toronto's Durham Region reporter, and not as a national reporter for Global National.

And finally, the notability bar for a mayor requires ongoing career coverage of her work in the role, enabling us to write a substantial article about her political impact, and is not automatically passed just because of the existence of a couple of obituaries the day after her death. Bearcat (talk) 15:59, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Mayor who receives local coverage, as expected, within their community. Does not pass the basic notability criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia (WP:N minus all these SNG's that just cause more problems than help). An obituary is generally written by the family or someone close to the subject and not necessarily an independent assessment of their life or anything notable that they accomplished. Also, obituaries are generally not intellectually independent in that they are picked up by multiple media outlets but they are carbon copies of the same information. That, by definition, is not multiple sources used in determining notability on Wikipedia. Multiple is not a numerical measure but an intellectual measure. --ARose Wolf 17:51, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete only local coverage. Doesn't meet the threshold of WP:NPOL or WP:POLOUTCOMES. Iamreallygoodatcheckers (talk) 07:03, 27 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Sadly, she could only be included if she had done something else of note, such as winning a major award, being the first woman to be mayor of a town in Canada, etc. Deb (talk) 18:58, 28 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as not really notable. Sorry. GenQuest ^"scribble" 01:56, 3 February 2021 (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.