Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ontario New Democratic Party candidates, 1995 Ontario provincial 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 keep. Mark Arsten (talk) 04:04, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ontario New Democratic Party candidates, 1995 Ontario provincial election[edit]

Ontario New Democratic Party candidates, 1995 Ontario provincial election (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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candidates fail WP:POLITICIAN - 3 BLPs/1 Biog with no assertion of notability , alternatively they may or may not be notable and if so should be created as separate BLPs/Biog Widefox; talk 11:28, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:55, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:55, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:55, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Technically I agree. Let me explain my point better - this article (and to a minor extent the better one you've pointed out) are WP:COATRACKs for BLPs of non-notable people. A mere listing of names would be fine (that other article would benefit from the BLP info column removed). The lead of this article even intros as such. Widefox; talk 14:41, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. While there may be disagreement on how much information should be included, the subject matter itself is clearly encyclopedic. CJCurrie (talk) 04:41, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with these lists is that the consensus to allow this approach was established almost a full decade ago, when Wikipedia's content and notability and sourcing standards were very different than they are now — so while they were compliant with the standards that existed at the time, they are very much not compliant with the standards that are in place now. For instance, rules such as WP:NPF, WP:BLPPRIVACY and WP:BLP1E did not exist when this article was created in 2005 — but they are in force now, and they absolutely destroy everything these lists were originally designed to accomplish in the first place.

These candidate lists are quite simply not allowed to look like this article anymore, but instead have to look like Ontario New Democratic Party candidates, 2011 Ontario provincial election, namely a complete, data-only table with no allowance for anything more than extremely basic information about the individuals. (Even the "BLP column" that the nominator pointed out above isn't designed to be a "BLP column", but rather is only supposed to note extremely basic information such as whether the person was already an incumbent MPP or not; the only person in that list whose entry contains any significant personal information about them at all does so only because the person who added it has revert-warred me whenever I've tried to remove it on BLP grounds, and I just got tired of the fight.) But the older articles have never been properly cleaned up to remain compliant with the evolving standard — and even in the articles that are written in the contemporary table format, as you can see from looking at the 2011 list nobody has ever really bothered to actually complete it in anything like a comprehensive fashion. Those candidates' names and vote totals are already in Ontario general election, 2011 (candidates) anyway, so the separate list isn't adding anything of real encyclopedic value, and we don't need any other information about them beyond that — not their career, not their other political activities, not their complete electoral record over a series of unsuccessful elections, not any of it. So while it's outside the purview of this particular discussion, you could make a very real case that even the 2011-formatted lists aren't encyclopedically valuable enough to be worth keeping either.

And that's before you even consider the fact that the party ran 130 candidates in the 1995 election, but this article contains information about just four of them. If they're not notable enough to stand on their own as full, independent BLPs, then they're not notable enough for this level of coverage either. It violates WP:NPF, WP:BLPPRIVACY and WP:BLP1E for us to maintain any substantive personal information about any of these people in any article, so these old leftover lists simply cannot stand in their existing format anymore. Delete. Bearcat (talk) 20:22, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

WP:BLPPRIVACY is only about what kind of particularly personal information we should be careful about including in articles, such as full names, birthdates, or contact info that is relevant to identify theft, as BLPPRIVACY makes clear in the beginning is its chief concern. It not only has nothing to say about any other kind of information or about who should or should not be covered at all, but does not even forbid the information it is concerned with but instead urges use of reliable sources and to err on the side of caution with removal requests. So BLPPRIVACY can never be a reason for deleting an article, only for line-item removals of certain limited facts.

And even if we could somehow characterize "being nominated for and running for public office" as an "event" (I think we cannot, without pretending "event" means "one thing of any kind or duration"), BLP1E "only applies to low profile individuals". And those who have chosen to be candidates for a provincial legislature cannot reasonably be considered "low profile." The whole point of BLP1E was and has always been to protect Joe Schmoe who is accidentally in the news just because an asteroid fell on his car or he randomly got taken hostage at the local Cracker Barrel. It's honestly ridiculous to try and stretch it to cover people who choose to run for a high-level government office, however unsuccessful they ultimately may be at that endeavor. postdlf (talk) 20:49, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

BLP1E most certainly is understood to mean "one thing of any kind or duration"; at the very least, it's routinely applied in AFD discussions to people who are "notable" only for running as an unsuccessful candidate in an election. And running for a government office does not lift a person past BLP1E or NPF in and of itself — for one thing, a candidate's "notability" is limited to a single electoral district, and does not make them a "public figure" of anything more than purely temporary and purely local interest. Winning election to office lifts a person beyond the reach of those policies, because the person becomes notable for actually holding office rather than just running for it, and thus becomes a higher-profile topic of broader and ongoing interest to a much wider variety of readers — but being an unsuccessful candidate in an individual electoral district does not, in and of itself, make a person "high profile", nor does it turn them into a topic of sustained or meaningful provincial, national or international interest. It just makes them a low-profile person who tried and failed to become notable, which isn't the same thing at all. Bearcat (talk) 21:07, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"routinely [mis]applied that way in AFD discussions." I know, I've seen it misused in that way by AFD !voters, though as I have seen it is very rare for an AFD to actually be closed on that incorrect basis. And we are fortunate enough to be literate so we can read what BLP1E actually says and not be bound by others' past mistakes. Though the issue is, in a way, moot, because we're not dealing with a standalone article here, but (if you insist on mischaracterizing it that way) the "event" [sic] of a political party's candidate slate in the 1995 Ontario provincial elections. There are also apparently notable candidates not listed here that should be, and the list could be expanded to list all candidates with at a minimum their election results and whether they previously (or subsequently) had held or run for office. So all that would remain would be disputes over what level of sourced detail is appropriate for each non-notable candidate in this article on the "event" [sic]. postdlf (talk) 21:25, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, BLP1E doesn't say anything about a maximum duration beyond which something ceases to count as a "single event"; rather, it applies to any situation, regardless of whether it's purely momentary in nature or sustains over a finite number of days, where a person involved in the "event" fails to achieve anything that would give them a sustained claim of notability outside the context of that specific period of time.
Reality show contestants, for example, are not automatically notable just because the show airs over seven or eight or thirteen weeks rather than starting and finishing within a single night; the entire season is still a single event, and the person's notability has to be meaningfully sustained past the end of the season before they qualify for an article. An election campaign, similarly, is still a single event, not a series of events — and so a person involved in it does not become a valid article topic unless they (a) were already a valid article topic before it began, or (b) attain something that would make them a topic of sustained interest after the election campaign ends (winning the election isn't the only way it's possible for that to happen — just look at John Turmel, for example — but barring extraordinary circumstances it's the only one that's actually applicable to most candidates.) But the whole campaign is still a single event; the fact that it's an event that unfolds over the space of four weeks, rather than being confined entirely to a single day, doesn't make it a series of discrete events.
As well, BLP and all of its subsections apply to any article at all that contains information about a living person (or one who can be presumed to still be living in the absence of properly sourced evidence to the contrary.) It does not only apply to standalone biographical articles about individual people — lists of people are still subject to BLP; articles about companies are subject to BLP if you try to add personal information about the CEO; and on and so forth. If there's information about one or more living people in an article, then BLP still applies regardless of what the article's "official" topic is or isn't. So I'm not "mischaracterizing" anything; BLP still applies directly to this article, because it contains information about people who are not clearly sourced as having died — and just for the record, the "event" is Ontario general election, 1995 itself, not the list of one party's candidates within it. The candidate list exists only as a way to collate information about individual people involved in the event — and thus all of the usual content policies, including WP:BLP, still apply to what we should or should not be writing about any individual person listed in it. (And even if we skipped the separate list and piled this stuff directly into the election article itself, BLP would still be applicable to that.) Bearcat (talk) 22:04, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It would take yet another screen of text to unravel all that equivocation, so I'll instead just stipulate to your use of reality show contestants as an analogy, as even for those who aren't independently notable, we still list them within each season article along with brief biographical info. Which is what this is trying to do. postdlf (talk) 01:42, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You might want to think a little bit harder about the difference between a nationally-broadcast reality show in which contestants are competing in front of a national television audience, and an election in which unelected candidates never become even marginally notable so much as one mile outside the boundaries of their own electoral district, if you think that this list is trying to accomplish the same thing as a "list of reality show contestants" is. Bearcat (talk) 02:19, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, a notable political party's candidates in a high-level election is an encyclopedic topic, and it's reasonable to have brief bios of them to the extent that is sourceable. I find it hard to believe that any candidates running at this level from this party would be mere ciphers; they themselves probably revealed quite a bit of their lives in their campaign because politics relies so heavily on biography in its attempts to appeal to the public. Nothing in WP:BLP compels deletion here, and any issues with what details are appropriate or properly sourced is a matter for cleanup through normal editing and discussion. Instead, this list should be expanded to be made comprehensive and developed further. postdlf (talk) 01:42, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I find it hard to believe that any candidates running at this level from this party would be mere ciphers; they themselves probably revealed quite a bit of their lives in their campaign because politics relies so heavily on biography in its attempts to appeal to the public. Again, you're missing the point: these people might very well have "revealed quite a bit of their lives in their campaign", but that revelation was exclusively local and temporary. It did not make them a topic of broader geographic interest to anyone who was not in a position to consider voting for them by virtue of living in the specific district where they were running, nor did it make them a topic of long-term interest that an encyclopedia should be hanging onto information about twenty years later. It simply does not make them notable enough to be kept, forever, in an encyclopedia with an international audience. Jeff Burch and David Jacobs and Arlene Rousseau simply aren't of any interest to us as topics that we need to maintain any information about beyond the simple fact that their names appeared on a ballot — if they run for office again in the future and win then we'll need a hell of a lot more than this, and if they don't then there's no encyclopedic value in us retaining any information about them besides their name, party and vote total (information which is already present in other places anyway.)
Certainly the option exists of trimming the lists back to policy-compliant versions (i.e. the 2011 format), but there are two problems with that approach: firstly, the list ends up being nothing but an unnecessary duplicate of the election article itself, and thus serving no real purpose at all; and secondly, it's not good enough to say the lists need to get trimmed back. That's been getting said for years, in a lot of venues, but nothing's been happening at all. (I'm the only editor who's ever actually attempted to actually fix a list, as far as I know, and I certainly can't fix all of them all by myself.) If we want to keep the lists, we have to actually deal with the problems and can't just talk about it endlessly. Sure, they can stay if they're fixed (but then there's still the open question of whether they're even a useful thing for us to have anymore), but they violate content policies in this form, and thus can't stay in this form. So if you want them fixed, start helping to fix them. Bearcat (talk) 02:12, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Sorry Bearcat, but I am philosophically opposed to you on this. I oppose the policy in general, and that's why I'm voting to keep. -- Earl Andrew - talk 04:25, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Further comment: I actually agree with Bearcat's arguments up to a point, in that I recognize Wikipedia's BLP and privacy policies have evolved significantly in the last decade. The approach that I took to creating these list pages (in most cases about five-to-eight years ago) is not one that I would follow today, and many of the candidate entries that I created do, with the benefit of hindsight, strike me as less-than-fully-encyclopedic by current standards (sometimes because the information seems unduly intrusive, but more often because it simply appears trivial). With that said, I do not believe that the approach advocated by Bearcat automatically or necessarily follows from current policy, and I certainly do not accept that current policy restricts us from including any significant biographical information about an unsuccessful candidate for public office.
There will, inevitably, be legitimate disagreement among editors as to how much information may reasonably be included on pages such as this; my view is that limiting this information to a brief indication of whether the candidate was an incumbent/cabinet minister/etc. is much too restrictive. My preferred approach, in light of current policy and best practices, is that candidate information on party list pages should be brief (usually 1-2 sentences) and generally limited to materials that are in the public interest. A candidate's electoral record and list of significant published works strike me as clearly within the latter category, while things like birthplace and education are more ambiguously so, and ephemeral newspaper quotes or campaign promises can generally be excised. (For a sense of what my approach would look like in practice, please see this page. Differing points of view are welcome.)
In any event, I don't believe this broader discussion is necessarily relevant to the current afd. We are not, at present, determining the form that list pages should take, but whether this particular page should exist at all. Even under the restrictive approach favoured by Bearcat, the page would still allow for an instant comparison of all party candidates in a way that Ontario general election, 1995 would not -- and, for that reason alone, I'll reiterate my view that the result should be an easy keep. CJCurrie (talk) 00:57, 14 September 2013 (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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