Talk:Toronto city council election, 2010

Bearcat has sent me a message to the effect that, as an administrator, he will lock me out of editing this page if I undo the deletions to external links to candidates' own web sites, citing a rule that there are no exceptions to the external link rule if the people in question do not have their own wikipedia article.

However, I note that on the Wikipedia entry on the 2006 election, there are external links to candidates' web sites that have not (as of yet) been deleted. There are also external links to mayoral candidates web sites for the 2010 election, which I am grateful that haven't been deleted yet.

I request that this matter be discussed for the following reasons: 1. Thanks to this interpretation of the rules, only incumbents are getting linked on an entry that the public does rely upon for information. I'm not saying that anyone is biased, but this does create a reasonable apprehension of bias, and it does not reflect well on wikipedia. 2. Just because certain candidates do not have their own wikipedia entries does not mean that they are not worthy of wikipedia entries. It just means that nobody has gotten around to writing articles about them. 3. External links to candidates web sites do not confer, in my view, the same status as a wikipedia entry. 4. Because there is an ongoing election, there should be some flexibility with the rules given the public interest at stake.

Thanking everyone in advance for their consideration.


 * Wikipedia does not exist to provide free publicity to anyone who wants it; that applies equally to Wikipedia articles and to linking to non-notable websites in lieu of Wikipedia articles. Our job here is to be an encyclopedia, not a search engine or a database of weblinks. Furthermore, linking to offsite campaign blogs and such actually reduces the likelihood that a non-elected politician who might still qualify for a Wikipedia article will actually get one, because why bother if their name is already linking somewhere else?
 * As I pointed out on your talk page, if a reader really wants or needs to see a candidate's own campaign website, they can type the candidate's name into Google themselves — our job here, as already pointed out in Wikipedia's policies and procedures, is to be encyclopedia in which information about notable people and events is present here, not to provide public service links to anyone who wants the extra web traffic whether they're actually notable in their own right or not. "The public interest", in the sense that you intend it, isn't our job to take into account here, because we're not the media.
 * And as for the question of bias, we simply don't care whether the incumbent is a left-winger or a right-winger or an NDPer or a Liberal or a Tory or a Nazi or a Stalinist or a Maoist or a Rhino — the only thing Wikipedia cares about is whether there are sufficient media sources to demonstrate that the person has done something sufficiently notable, such as holding office, to warrant an encyclopedia entry. Incumbent councillors, regardless of their political affiliation, will almost always have that; unelected council wannabes, regardless of their political affiliation, may or may not have it in individual circumstances. But the challengers aren't entitled to anything from us just because they're candidates, if third party sources which actually demonstrate independent notability aren't present. We're not the media, so we're not bound by any requirement to give equal time to all contenders in an election — our job here is to document notability that's already been established elsewhere, not to help anybody build their notability. Our job is not to provide comprehensive news coverage of an election as it unfolds or to provide anybody with a current directory of campaign literature; it's to document the long view of history after the public have made their decisions through other information sources. Bearcat (talk) 19:29, 5 July 2010 (UTC)


 * As well, please read WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. "Some other article does the same thing" isn't a useful or valid argument in a Wikipedia policy discussion; sometimes the real story is that other article shouldn't be doing it and needs to be cleaned up. And the fact that some of the offsite links on Toronto municipal election, 2006 are dead is precisely another reason why we shouldn't be doing it — if we can't (or won't) monitor the article regularly to ensure that its external links are all still active, then those links don't belong there in the first place. Bearcat (talk) 19:45, 5 July 2010 (UTC)


 * And on top of everything else, in the process of removing external links from the 2006 article, I even caught one instance where for some bizarre reason the incumbent councillor, who has a Wikipedia article, was also being linked to an external campaign website instead of their actual Wikipedia article. Bearcat (talk) 20:35, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed and interesting comments. With that in mind, perhaps it would be more intellectually honest to delete the entire article on both the mayoral and the city councillor elections until the election itself has taken place, given this interpretation of what constitutes notability on wikipedia. But that would probably be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Also, I am not sure that the emphasis here should be so much on the possible motives of the candidates, whether they are candidates for re-election or not, as much as it should be on the needs of the public. The public does, for better of for worse, consult wikipedia for information on the election as it unfolds. After the election is over, a great deal of our concerns over who is notable and who isn't will take on a different connotation, and will probably be moot. Notoriety may not be a concept that is as set in stone as one might think. Anyway, just some food for thought... I'd be interested what some other wikipedia users have to think about the topic, assuuming anyone else has any comments... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Besomim (talk • contribs) 01:31, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from 99.233.104.40, 9 July 2010
editsemiprotected

I would just like to add the link to Peter Nolan, the ward 21 candidate. his website is www.voterpeternolan.ca thanks...

99.233.104.40 (talk) 07:31, 9 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: Kindly review the above discussion; per Wikipedia policy, offsite links to candidates' own personal websites are not welcome or appropriate in this article. Bearcat (talk) 08:05, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

Edit request: ward 6 & 10
Wendell Brereton is now a city council candidate in Ward 6. See and  and. Round the Horne (talk) 21:09, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

In Ward 10, incumbent Mike Feldman has officially announced he's not running.Round the Horne (talk) 04:54, 5 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Just for the record, this page is currently only "semi-protected", which means that anonymous IP numbers (and people who've just registered a brand-new account to spam up the article with campaign brochures and such) can't edit the article — but anybody who has an established edit history still can. Bearcat (talk) 02:31, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Listing websites of candidates
Bearcat is saying "we" don't want to list candidate websites, however, this is done at Toronto_mayoral_election,_2010. Is there actually a policy against including a candidate's website along with their information and/or is there a consensus against doing so? Dramedy Tonight (talk) 19:33, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, there are explicit rules against (a) using sources that aren't themselves notable, and/or are self-published, and (b) sticking external links to other websites directly into body text as a way around the fact that the topic in question isn't actually notable enough for an article on Wikipedia. The only parts of any Wikipedia article that should ever contain any link that would take you off of this website are the references and external links sections, and even those are subject to rules around notability (i.e. references need to be to reliable media, not to self-published websites or blogs) and linkfarming (i.e. external links is not for creating a comprehensive web directory of every remotely related webpage you can find, but only for the one or two most centrally important websites pertaining to the article's primary topic.)
 * It should also be pointed out that Wikipedia is not "the media"; it isn't our job to provide such links as a "public service to Toronto voters" or to provide "equal time" to everybody who happens to have their name on an election ballot. Our job here is to link internally to things and people that are notable, not to provide increased web traffic to minor unelected city council candidates who don't qualify for articles on here.
 * And the other problem is that generally speaking, nobody takes the time to monitor such links to ensure that they're still active once they're in the article — just a few weeks ago, in fact, I was still removing dead external links from the 2003 and 2006 election articles, because nobody had put in the effort to keep the articles up to date.
 * The bottom line is that an external link to a candidate's own campaign website is not an acceptable substitute for meeting Wikipedia's notability guidelines. If they don't qualify for an article on here, then their name doesn't get to be linked anywhere at all. Not because I say so, but because Wikipedia's rules say so. Wikipedia is not a web directory. If a Toronto voter (of which I am one myself) needs extra information about a particular council candidate, there's nothing stopping them from Googling that person's name themselves — so quite aside from the fact that it explicitly violates Wikipedia rules, the links simply aren't needed, because they're not serving any necessary purpose here.
 * Also, please read WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Just because some other article does something doesn't mean this one should too; in fact, it may be the case that the other article shouldn't be doing it and needs to be cleaned up the other way. Bearcat (talk) 21:51, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

/* Ward 27: Toronto Centre */Robert Meynell
Why has Dramedy Tonight cut the mention of Meynell's book and his policy positions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.119.65.125 (talk) 02:21, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

what to do about candidates that do not meet notability guidelines
The general rule advised in WP:POLITICIAN is that pages for people who are political candidates and who do not otherwise meet any of the notability guidelines should redirect to the appropriate page covering the election. That rule seems to justify the creation of redirection pages for any and all candidates. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.216.132.240 (talk) 18:19, 7 October 2010 (UTC)