Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Janeese Lewis George

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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 no consensus. The policy based argument is that this should be deleted or redirected or moved to draft. However, this isn't so cut and dried as we know the clock is ticking. As such, and given the range of policy compliant outcomes that don't involve deletion this feels like no consensus in any direction. In the event they are not elected we can redo this. Spartaz Humbug! 21:58, 17 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Janeese Lewis George[edit]

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Janeese Lewis George (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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A case of WP:TOOSOON. An earlier PROD was removed citing that a seat on the Council of the District of Columbia automatically meets WP:NPOL - while this is absolutely true, the subject is a candidate for this seat - she does not hold it yet. Being a candidate for a notable position explicitly fails WP:NPOL. Though she is mentioned in the NY Times article, it is not about her, and the Washington Post articles are essentially local coverage in this case. Obviously, if she wins in November, the article should be reinstated. Jmertel23 (talk) 13:39, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Jmertel23 (talk) 13:39, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Washington, D.C.-related deletion discussions. Jmertel23 (talk) 13:39, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep There's no "if she wins". She's running unopposed in the general election. Even if she were opposed, in DC the Democratic nominee is the presumptive winner, as its 75% Democrat and 19% Independent. Why would you even nominate this page without proper research? If you bothered to look at the other nominees in the NYT article, you'd see that they all have pages. Bangabandhu (talk) 14:01, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete (without prejudice against recreation if she wins in November), alternately Draftify. though she may be the presumptive winner, it's not guaranteed that she will win. stranger things have happened. This is a fail of WP:NPOL until the election is concluded, and she doesn't have enough coverage to meet WP:GNG or WP:NPERSON independently. WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is not a valid AfD rationale. Eddie891 Talk Work 14:25, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
How amusing that you cite OSE in the same sentence as you reference other stuff. If she's struck by lighting, as in the example you suggest, the page would be reassessed then. Bangabandhu (talk) 15:02, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
When she wins the general, why support a page then? By your logic she could still die in between the election and when she takes office. Bangabandhu (talk) 15:48, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
amended vote to add acceptability of draftification Eddie891 Talk Work 20:41, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The deletion rationale is explicitly foreclosed by the notability guidelines. The top of Wikipedia:Notability (people)#Additional criteria, of which WP:NPOL is one, explicitly states that Failure to meet these criteria is not conclusive proof that a subject should not be included; conversely, meeting one or more does not guarantee that a subject should be included (my bolding). Rather, as described in WP:N, the question of notability always comes down to WP:V: are there enough reliable sources to write a good article about this person?
In this case, there is. Due to her socialist politics and positions on police reform, Lewis George is rapidly emerging as a notable figure in U.S. politics, receiving a 1500-word profile in The Intercept [1] and detailed coverage in the New York Times [2] and a HuffPost article [3], in addition to plenty of coverage in the Washington Post [4], DCist [5], and Washington City Paper [6]. This shows that Lewis George has unambiguously received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject. Therefore, she passes WP:BASIC and is a notable person. The fact that this coverage was generated in the course of her running for public office is irrelevant to the notability guidelines as written. FourViolas (talk) 15:19, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The Washington news sources are WP:ROUTINE and/or local news coverage of a city election. It's a mischaracterization to describe the NYtimes article as 'detailed'; all it says is "in Washington, D.C., Janeese Lewis George, a self-described democratic socialist, beat a sitting city councilman whose mailers said Ms. George wanted “to cut police in Ward 4.” She prevailed by 10 percentage points." The Intercept is a good profile and the HuffPost is valid coverage, but IMO there's just not enough there to pass WP:NPERSON; there's no consensus on the reliability of Huffpost and The Intercept is recognized to politically slanted.
It is not Wikipedia's place to decide who will win an election before the election occurs (it's simply too soon), and candidates do not have inherent notability just for running. The question to ask is not whether she will win an election, it's 'excepting that she's probably going to win, is she notable?"and the answer is, no. There's some coverage, yes, because she's a controversial candidate' but it isn't enough to substantiate notability. Though it's often overlooked, WP:BASIC specifically states "Primary sources may be used to support content in an article, but they do not contribute toward proving the notability of a subject." (my emphasis) Eddie891 Talk Work 22:27, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate your concurrence that she could theoretically be notable prior to being elected, if there were enough secondary sources to meet BASIC.
I disagree that the DC regional sources qualify as "routine". WP:ROUTINE gives announcements, sports, speculative coverage, and tabloid journalism [...] Wedding announcements, sports scores, crime logs,[...] sports matches, film premieres, press conferences as examples of what "routine coverage" means. These barely qualify as journalism; they're cookie-cutter snippets that are repeated over and over, sometimes within the same edition of a paper, with the names and dates changed. In contrast, the DC stories (especially the City Paper piece) go into unique details in creative, non-trivial ways: they describe her political positions, her professional history and life story, the interpersonal dynamics of the race, the historical context for the contest in terms of demographic changes and shifting alliances, notable campaign finance details, etc.
WP:NPERSON doesn't have requirements about the geographical breadth of coverage. WP:NCORP does have a stricter standard, WP:AUD, that requires at least one regional, statewide, provincial, national, or international source; I think the NYT (which, you're right, was less detailed than I implied) and Intercept both suffice to show that this page is of potential interest to WP readers outside the DC area. FourViolas (talk) 23:49, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have to agree with Bearcat here, and I'd argue that it's still too early to say that she is definitively notable. We have NPOL and guidelines against articles on candidates for a reason, and allowing one because it seems almost definite she will win sets us down a slippery slope. While you may have no doubt whatsoever that historians of 10 years from now will be interested in her (presumably if she doesn't win), I have such doubts and regardless we cannot really be the ones to say what historians may or may not cover.
I think Bearcat is correct in saying that almost all candidates have coverage for running in local papers that cover elections (yes, even the WaPo article is 'local' here). The New York Times article really is no more than a sentence, which doesn't show me that there's interest outside of DC. We are then left with mainly her profile in The Intercept which I'd argue isn't enough to substantiate notability at this point by itself. I agree that she probably will win, and we can revisit the article then. However, Wikipedia isn't in the business of hosting candidate's biographies until they actually do definitively meet notability thresholds. Best wishes, Eddie891 Talk Work 20:38, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete unelected candidates for city council are not notable.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:29, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Userfy The article until the elections happen in November, if they even go ahead, this is a case of WP:TOOSOONSeasider91 (talk) 18:14, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Essentially an elected candidate as she is running unopposed. No point deleting an article just to recreate it in a couple of months. WP:COMMONSENSE. AlessandroTiandelli333 (talk) 18:41, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Her win is all but assured. She has also received plenty of coverage in multiple RS. KidAd (talk) 00:01, 17 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 02:27, 8 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, obviously without prejudice against recreation in November if she wins. Draftify also acceptable. The fact that she's currently running unopposed is not, in and of itself, an exemption from having to pass WP:NPOL the normal way — things can still happen that can still cause an unopposed candidate to never actually assume the office at all: even unopposed candidates have actually been forced to resign for health or political scandal reasons, or died before election day, and thus never actually assumed the office they were running for. So unopposed on the ballot or not, she still has to actually hold the seat, not just be a candidate, before she actually qualifies for an article. And no, the fact that campaign coverage exists is not in and of itself a WP:GNG-based exemption from having to pass WP:NPOL, either: campaign coverage of every candidate in every election always exists, so if that were how it worked then NPOL would be inherently meaningless because nobody would ever actually have to pass it anymore. So to argue that a candidate is somehow more special than other candidates, it is not enough to show that campaign coverage existed: what's necessary is to show that even if she dies or resigns before election day and thus never actually assumes the office at all, her candidacy has still somehow become so uniquely important that people will still be looking for information about it in 2030 anyway. Bearcat (talk) 18:20, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NPOL explicitly states that an unelected candidate for political office [...] can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline. If we actually followed this perfectly clear rule, NPOL would not be inherently meaningless: it would simply state that people who have held sufficiently high political offices can be safely presumed to have enough coverage to be notable.
Separately, I have no doubt whatsoever that historians of 10 years from now will be interested to know that a socialist woman of color, running on a platform of defunding the police, won the only contested stage of an election for the city council of the U.S. capitol in 2020 amid national mass demonstrations against racialized police brutality. FourViolas (talk) 18:43, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it would make NPOL inherently meaningless. Every single person who's ever been involved in politics at all — mayors, city councillors, school board trustees, parks and library and planning committee members, non-winning candidates for office, and on and so forth — can always show three or four hits of campaign coverage without exception, so if showing three or four hits of campaign coverage were all it took to hand such people a GNG-based exemption from having to meet NPOL, then every single person involved in politics would always earn that exemption. Literally nobody would ever even have to be measured against NPOL at all anymore, because literally nobody involved in politics could ever fail to be exempted from it if a handful of campaign coverage were all it took to earn the exemption. Bearcat (talk) 18:51, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's unclear whether you read the sourcing, don't understand it, or just don't care. She has had abundant national coverage that is wholly different from "three or four hits of campaign coverage". Bangabandhu (talk) 19:06, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) It is not remotely true that every library committee member and school board trustee in the U.S. has been the primary subject of full-length articles in the Washington Post, the Intercept, and multiple regional newspapers. It is true that applying the NPOL guideline correctly (as written) would cause a number of articles on candidates for subnational office to be kept, allowing voters and historians to rely on Wikipedia for reliably sourced, substantial information about the details of the world's political landscape; I fail to see how this is an argument against doing so. FourViolas (talk) 19:09, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't say that every library committee member and school board trustee in the US has been the subject of coverage in the Washington Post — but every library committee member and school board trustee in the US most certainly has been the subject of coverage in their local papers, and the Washington Post is the local paper of a person who's doing those things in Washington DC. It's also a principle of NPOL that people who would ordinarily fail NPOL (library committee members, school board trustees, non-winning candidates for office, etc.) are not automatically more special just because they happen to live in a major city, so that their purely expected local-interest coverage happens to be appearing in a more prestigious newspaper than the purely expected local-interest coverage of other people doing the exact same things in other cities is appearing in — the Washington Post most certainly does still cover local interest figures in local interest contexts that wouldn't ordinarily clear our notability standards, and those people aren't automatically more special than everybody else just because they're doing not inherently notable things in Washington instead of Peoria and thus have their routinely expected local coverage showing up in the Washington Post instead of the Peoria Journal Star. GNG does still test for the context of what the person is getting covered for, and deprecate some contexts as less notability-making than other contexts. Bearcat (talk) 13:22, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Conditional keep WP:IAR. The subject does not pass WP:NPOL as an unelected candidate as Bearcat describes. And our general precedent encourages us discount local coverage of campaign coverage as WP:ROUTINE (the race is notable, the candidates may not be). However, common sense should apply in this situation and it's not worth the effort to split hairs and address all of the scenarios that could occur that prevent the subject from winning the election or taking office (write-in campaign, death, etc.). Unlike a solid keep, which would generally preclude revisiting the discussion, my vote is conditional or contingent on the candidate winning election. --Enos733 (talk) 19:27, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question My knowledge of AfD process is dated, but isn't it a requirement to notify previous editors of the page that this is under consideration? I don't think that's been done in this case. Bangabandhu (talk) 22:48, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Fails WP:NPOL in its purest sense. I don't see any mitigating reason, in the discussion abovem to keep it. It can be recreated in November, if needed.scope_creepTalk 14:50, 16 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Keep: As per AlessandroTiandelli333 and Enos733. Overall, FourViolas comment is the most complete and proper point in the whole of discussion. I, in particular, agree with his points on WP:N and WP:NPERSON. Also, it is clearly stated in the notability guideline for politicians that the subject may still be notable even if he misses on the criteria (barely misses) which is subject to the group of wikipedians examining the notability to decide. Regards Pesticide1110 (talk) 15:52, 16 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. She's running unopposed for an office that will make her hit the notability threshold. Deleting only to recreate when she's formally appointed is process wonkery. Stifle (talk) 13:16, 17 June 2020 (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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