User talk:Bobagem

Sharon Howarth
Generally, we don't do articles on candidates for legislative seats unless they are notable in their own right. I don't think there's enough there to justify a separate article; just brief additions to articles on the other guys involved. -- Orange Mike  &#x007C;   Talk  19:50, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Adriana Mugnatto-Hamu
If this were a locally-oriented Torontopedia, I'd most likely agree that she was notable enough for inclusion. However, your article didn't demonstrate that she should be seen as notable enough for a worldwide audience such as Wikipedia's — you didn't really provide any convincing evidence that either her basic notability, or the breadth of coverage she's received for her activities, extended in any meaningful way outside the boundaries of Toronto itself. In an international project such as this, the more local the person's notability is the harder it gets to credibly prove that they merit an article on here — because you need to demonstrate their notability to an international audience.

As for the conflict of interest issue, our rule on here isn't really that as long as you declare it somewhere you can then proceed to do exactly what you wanted anyway — it's that you should really try to avoid conflicts of interest altogether, by just not writing about topics or people with whom you have a direct personal or professional relationship at all. Which is not to say that you can't correct straightforward errors of fact — for instance, if for some reason our article were claiming that Nicki Minaj or Anthony Weiner had been elected leader of the Green Party of Canada, you'd be within your rights to correct that if you happened to be the first person to catch it — but you need to take great care to avoid edits which could be perceived as promoting the party, such as creating articles about individual candidates. Bearcat (talk) 23:17, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Notability on Wikipedia is not a question of whether sources can be found which happen to mention her name in passing — it's a question of whether sources can be found which are primarily or substantially about her, a distinction which virtually all of your real media sources failed. The fact that a newspaper article about an event mentions her name as an organizer, or includes a brief quote from her, doesn't demonstrate encyclopedic notability — any newspaper article about an event, if written by a halfway competent journalist, will mention and/or talk to someone who's organizing it, but that doesn't mean that every single person on earth who ever participated in organizing a political rally should have an article in an international encyclopedia. And the fact that basic media coverage of the election race that she ran in happens to mention her name doesn't prove her encyclopedic notability, either — it just proves that journalists are doing their jobs by giving at least basic coverage to everyone in the race. But in both cases she still wasn't the subject of substantial coverage that was specifically about her in any meaningful way; her name was merely mentioned in connection to basic coverage of events that she happened to be participating in, which is not the same thing.
 * And of course, I can't leave out that you still sourced significant chunks of the article to Green Party press releases instead of to independent media coverage.
 * For what it's worth, Wikipedia policy isn't just a matter of what's written in the policy guidelines; there's also a substantial body of practice and precedent and consensus that one needs to be familiar with to be an effective judge of whether an article meets our inclusion rules or not. Think of it as sort of like the Canadian Constitution that way — big chunks of it may be unwritten convention instead of being formally codified into written law, but those conventions are still just as relevant and enforceable as the written parts.
 * And finally, I should point out that "notability" on Wikipedia is not a judgement of her as an individual — it's merely a judgement on the quality of the article as it was written. It is possible to write a keepable article about a person whose notability is primarily local in scope, and it's possible to write a deletable article about the President of the United States — it's a question of the quality of what's been written, not of whether any individual Wikipedia editor likes or dislikes the person. Bearcat (talk) 02:09, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Even having been an interview guest on a radio show does not, in and of itself, make her notable; it might be evidence that she's notable enough, if the rest of the article were supported by better sources, but we need to keep the cause and effect clear — saying that she was on the show because she might be notable is not the same as saying that she's notable because she was on the show. And no, your media sources were not about her — I went through and checked each and every one individually, and again, at least one merely verified the existence of the event itself but didn't mention her involvement at all, and several were still party press releases, but even the ones which were valid sources that mentioned her still weren't about her in the sense of actually providing substantial or non-trivial information about who she is and what she does beyond "organized an event" or "is running in an election".

The thing is, while you certainly demonstrated that she's done other things besides running in the election, you simply did not demonstrate that those things make her notable enough to be in an encyclopedia. The fact that an issue might be prominent enough to merit an encyclopedia article does not, in and of itself, confer notability on every individual person who happens to be involved in advocating around that issue; the person still has to meet our notability guidelines on their own, still has to garner substantial media coverage that's about them. Not "by" them, not "mentioning" them, not "quoting" them — about them. And based on when you created the article, your own self-acknowledged conflict of interest and the fact that your only prior contribution to Wikipedia under this name was to do the very same thing in the previous election, I have to presume that the article's primary objective was to promote her candidacy — there was nothing else in the article which would suggest that she belongs in an encyclopedia with an international audience, and nothing else which would suggest that the article would even have been written in the first place had she not been nominated as an election candidate a few days earlier.

But the bottom line is that while I certainly made the initial nomination, the decision to delete the article was made by a consensus of AFD participants, not by me alone — which means that it's not really my responsibility to take personal ownership of that decision. If the other participants had disagreed with my nomination, then they had every right to say so and to "vote" accordingly. So long story short, I'm really not interested in getting drawn into any further debate about this. Bearcat (talk) 07:00, 20 June 2011 (UTC)