Talk:Electoral district of Northcott

Baird-O'Farrell irony
There is an irony between Bruce and Mike Baird and Barry O'Farrell.

Bruce Baird was unsuccessful in becoming Premier to succeed Nick Greiner which eventually lead him to retire at the 1995 election. This saw O'Farrell to succeed Baird in Northcott.

With Northcott's abolition, O'Farrell moved to Ku-ringai and later became Premier and was succeeded by Baird's son Mike.

If Bruce Baird had succeeded in becoming Premier in 1992, Baird would not have retired from Northcott in 1995 and succeeded by O'Farrell.

Hence the irony of O'Farrell becoming Premier and then succeeded by Mike Baird, Mike have accomplished in becoming Premier which his father had been unsuccessful in achieving.

122.108.156.100 (talk) 23:13, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
 * What you now have to do is find a citation for every clause you've written, per WP:BLP, and cite the word ironic, per WP:OR. Stephen 00:44, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

The removal of the word "irony" from the article is outrageous because it makes what I written about O'Farrell and the Bairds rather meaningless. You do not need to have a citation for the evidence of history. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.108.156.100 (talk) 00:54, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

This is all got started because of suspicious one-off editors who had been removing the word "irony" for no other reason but to harass me. These one-off editors are surely the same person who I have a bad history with online as this person seeks pleasure in harassing me. Established editors should not succumb to this harassment by assisting with it.Matthew See (talk) 01:05, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Please do not continue the edit warring. Per WP:BRD a discussion has been opened so the edit should be discussed, not reinstated. Equally, per WP:V all content should be referenced, hence why I requested the citation. I am not aware of any harassment and certainly do not condone such behaviour; however, the subject of this discussion is the use of the word "ironically" in this article. If you have concerns about other behaviour, please raise it at the appropriate administrator talk page. I will fully protect the article now as you have demonstrated a failure to constructively discuss the matter. Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 01:18, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Please see irony. Lankiveil (speak to me) 02:31, 19 September 2016 (UTC).
 * Although it is often erroneously used that way, "ironically" is not synonymous with "funnily" or "coincidentally" — irony requires a gap between what can reasonably be expected and what actually happens, and/or the outside observer having knowledge that the participants in the situation don't have. For this situation to be ironic, O'Farrell would have to have pushed Bruce Baird out of the seat through unsavory tactics, and then gotten hoist on his own petard by getting pushed out of the premiership in favour of Mike Baird by the same unsavory tactics he used to unseat Mike's dad. The simple fact of being succeeded by his predecessor's son, however, is not ironic in and of itself, because there's nothing inherently unexpected or unforeseeable about a politician's son following his dad into politics 15 or 20 or 30 years later. Both Bruce Baird → Barry O'Farrell and Barry O'Farrell → Mike Baird are simply normal successions, where the predecessor retired voluntarily and then the successor was chosen through a normal candidate selection process — so irony is simply lacking from the situation. It's an amusing coincidence, sure, but that's not the same thing as actual irony.
 * And at any rate, Wikipedia does not apply or publish our own value judgements or opinions about a situation — if you want to describe a situation as ironic in a Wikipedia article, then you need to support that with a reliable source which has already adjudicated the situation as being ironic. And that's precisely because "ironic" is a word that's so frequently misused. Bearcat (talk) 15:26, 19 September 2016 (UTC)