Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tamatha Paul

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 see the argument for keeping this, but I don't think that with Wikipedia's current philosophy regarding guidelines a "keep" close would be considered correct w/o a change in the inclusion criteria beforehand. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:04, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Tamatha Paul[edit]

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Subject is a president of student union on Victoria University and a City council of a population of around 200K, thus fails WP:NPOL notability requirements. CASSIOPEIA^(talk) 06:34, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions. CASSIOPEIA^(talk) 06:34, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of New Zealand-related deletion discussions. CASSIOPEIA^(talk) 06:34, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 11:47, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Wellington is not large enough to hand its city councillors an free "inherently notable" pass over NPOL #2 just because they exist, but three of the four references here are primary sources (her own self-published website about herself, and two raw tables of election results) which are not support for notability at all, and the one that actually represents media coverage is not enough all by itself to get her over the bar. GNG does not just automatically cover off every single person who's ever gotten their name into any newspaper once — it tests for volume and depth and range and context, not just for n>=1, so making a city councillor notable enough for an article requires a lot more than this. And being president of a university student union has exactly nothing to do with any of our notability criteria at all, so that doesn't automatically make her any more notable than other city councillors either. Bearcat (talk) 18:00, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It often makes my blood boil that people who're otherwise apparently rational can decide that Wikipedia's inclusion criteria ---- rules, let's remind ourselves, which require us to retain the list of crayola crayon colours, more than 50kb of content on sexuality in Star Trek, that article about the psychic octopus, and smoot ---- also somehow require us to delete the biographies of intelligent and accomplished people on the pretext those people aren't "notable". It is utterly ridiculous that our rules say this. I am therefore adopting the position that the sources I've found (1, 2, 3) collectively amount to a good case for this lady's "notability."—S Marshall T/C 19:13, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If all you had to do to make a person notable enough for a Wikipedia article is claim that they were intelligent and accomplished enough to be fundamentally more notable than a list of crayon colours, then everybody would always claim that, nobody would ever be non-notable anymore, and then we'd just be LinkedIn. Every city councillor in every city can always show three local sources and therefore claim to be more notable than smoot, which is precisely why that isn't enough to make every city councillor on earth permanently notable. Bearcat (talk) 02:34, 20 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, I do understand how Wikipedia works. She would be worthy of an article if she was a footballer who'd played at an international level for seven minutes, or a cat that uses the bus, or an individual episode of the Twilight Zone, but since she's merely a person who's achieved something worthwhile, we need to hurry up and delete her article. If a non-Wikipedian asked me to explain that logically, I couldn't do it without making our encyclopaedia sound really badly thought out. Could you?—S Marshall T/C 16:29, 20 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. The only thing that's relevant here is whether or not she clears the notability standard that we apply to city councillors, and that notability standard is that she has to be significantly more notable than most other city councillors. Whether or not she's more notable than a cat has nothing to do with it — because, again, every single city councillor can always claim to be more notable than a cat, so if that were the bar that a city councillor had to clear we would always have to keep an article about every single city councillor on the planet. But we have an established consensus that city councillors are not all inherently notable, and are accepted only if they can be shown to be significantly more nationally or internationally notable than most other city councillors. Bearcat (talk) 23:52, 20 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. It's a stupid consensus, though. Encyclopaedists are fundamentally educators. We should be more respectful and inclusive towards academics (and particularly academics who aren't male, stale and pale); and we should be focusing our deletion efforts on trivia, marketing and spam. I've been on a Wikibreak recently so I'm temporarily seeing things as the non-Wikipedian sees them, and wow, our rules are really peculiar and we've got our priorities badly wrong.—S Marshall T/C 01:03, 21 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing in the article, or any of your sources, suggests that she's an academic. Are you misinterpreting what it means to be president of a student union? Because that doesn't make a person an academic — it makes her a student. Bearcat (talk) 17:36, 21 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

She graduated in December, actually, according to her website. I agree that she's an academic politician and not a political academic.—S Marshall T/C 21:31, 21 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with our notability standard for academics. A person has to be a faculty member, not a student body politician, to be considered an "academic" for the purposes of passing WP:NACADEMICS. Bearcat (talk) 22:54, 21 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. That alphabet soup is why we need to delete this lady's article, and there's other alphabet soup about why we need to keep this article about the basketball team's mascot, this article about the bloke with a really long name, this article about a doll's jobs, and this article about which way round to hang your toilet paper. I agree that throughout this discussion, you've correctly stated the rules. My point is that in cases like this, the rules lead to silly outcomes.—S Marshall T/C 10:47, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There's nothing remotely silly about the idea that city councillors aren't inherently notable, and no reason why this one is somehow uniquely more notable than others. Bearcat (talk) 20:40, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete for failing WP:POLITICIAN and WP:GNG. WP:INTELLIGENTANDACCOMPLISHED is not a valid justification. Clarityfiend (talk) 19:30, 19 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete obviously does not meet notability qualifications. Kiwichris (talk) 01:11, 20 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete clearly does not meet our notability gudieline for politicians. As I have said on many occasions, I think our current notability guidelines on footballers are an aberation. By a similar guidelines we would hold every holder of a tenure track university professorship, or maybe everyone who ever was a teacher of record of even one university course, to be notable. I have to admit since I agree with John McAdams view on how we should consider and treat graduate students who are the teacher of record on a course and use that postion to attack the intellectual freedom of their students, I can see some validity there, but I also understand why we do not do that. Which is why we should get rid of the aberation of 7 minutes play in one game making someone notable as a footballer.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:50, 20 October 2019 (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.