User talk:Mattfguerin

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Kathryn Holloway
One thing it's important to understand is that Wikipedia's standards, both around the quality of sourcing that's required to support an article and around what even constitutes a valid claim of notability on here in the first place, are much stricter in 2014 than they were when the article was first created. So it's possible for an article that might have passed muster in 2005 or 2006 to simply not be acceptable on here anymore under current standards and practices.

The article's key problem was that the good sources it was citing were all tied to her political candidacy itself, while everything else that might potentially have constituted a claim of notability for other non-political activities was referenced to either primary sources which cannot confer notability on a person (e.g. the web pages of the involved organizations, or content that she wrote herself), or to completely dead links whose content couldn't be verified — or was not actually referenced at all (the entire "NGO work" section, frex, didn't contain a single footnoted reference). And during the process I searched three different Canadian newspaper databases at ProQuest (Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies, Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail), and in all three of them I completely failed to turn up even one single solitary word of coverage of her outside of the specific context of her electoral candidacies — so I really struggle to understand where you're think you're going to turn for sourcing improvements, other than more primary sources.

When it comes to establishing whether a person is notable enough for other things to counterbalance their lack of notability as a politician, the key danger you have to watch out for is whether that other notability claim is being sourced to coverage of that activity in its own right, or whether it's being sourced to mere mentions of that activity as background in coverage of the candidacy. If you're going to claim, for example, that John Smith is notable because he was president of a company before he ran for office, then you have to be able to source that claim to media coverage that he garnered specifically as president of a company — if the only reliable source that you've got for the claim that he was president of a company is passing mentions of that fact in coverage of his run for office, then you haven't actually proven that his presidency of a company is something he should have an encyclopedia article for. And if the only other source you've got for the information is his "our president" profile on the webpage of the company, then that's a primary source that still cannot demonstrate his notability.

You also say that you've edited her article in the past — but there's no trace of you doing so in either your own contribution history or the article's edit history. To be honest, when an editor with essentially no prior contribution history suddenly shows up as creator of a new article about an unelected political candidate (or arguing against the deletion of an old one), there's a rather long history of this kind of thing almost always being conflict of interest editing by somebody with a direct personal stake in the candidate's career (e.g. the campaign manager, somebody else on their staff, an active supporter, etc.) We have a policy of assuming good faith, so I can't dock you for that just on principle — but unfortunately, even discounting that concern I still don't have a lot of confidence that what "notability" means to you and what "notability" means in the Wikipedia context are actually in alignment here.

So I'm certainly willing to restore the article to your sandbox — it'll be at User:Mattfguerin/Kathryn Holloway — but I'm going to strip all of the dead links and primary-source references right off the top. So I need to ask you to make sure that you understand the difference between a reliable source and a primary one, because her chances of being able to get an article back into Wikipedia right now rest entirely on being able to pile a metric tonne of reliable sourcing onto the NGO work. The "political life" section is permissible as extra content if her notability as an activist is properly sourced — if she wins election to the city council seat that she's currently running for, then she'll certainly qualify for a new article at that time, but nothing in the "political life" section qualifies her for a Wikipedia article as things stand today. The NGO stuff, if it can be sourced properly, is what has to carry her right now — like I said, I don't know what sourcing improvements you think you've got since I already came up empty in three separate newspaper database searches, but I'm willing to give you the chance.

Sorry I was kind of longwinded here, but I hope that helps a bit. Bearcat (talk) 05:25, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi there. I am one of the original editors of this page, so I took the time today to work on it and bring it up to standard. I added about a dozen more sources Sisterwoman (talk) 20:43, 16 August 2014 (UTC)


 * The problem with relying on the Crookes lawsuit as a principal claim of notability is that her name isn't mentioned, not even in passing, in any of the media coverage of it that you've cited — if you have to cite the original text of the court decision itself to prove that she was a defendant in it because her name doesn't appear in even one of the actual news articles about it, then that's an invalid WP:PRIMARYSOURCE. And you're still relying disproportionately on ineligible sources for most of the content about her activist career, too — leaving aside the "libel chill" section for a second, references #9, #19 and #20 are still invalid primary sources, #22 is not a media outlet that passes our reliable sourcing standards, and #8 merely mentions her name in passing without being about her in a substantive enough way to carry her notability all by itself. Bearcat (talk) 17:04, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Please don't post the entire transcript of a television interview to another user's talk page in the future. That aside, there's a significant difference between being the guest in a television interview (which might point to preexisting notability, but does not demonstrate it by itself) and being the subject of the coverage (which is what it takes to confer notability.) It's actually a core precept of our notability rules that interviews with the subject do not confer notability by themselves — they're acceptable for some confirmation of facts after notability has been properly covered off by "topic is the subject of the coverage" sources, but "topic is the interviewee" sources cannot put a person over the notability bar in and of themselves if they're the only useful sources you've got. So no, that interview still doesn't, in and of itself, make the libel chill section properly sourced if all of the other sources in it are still weak or primary. It would be an acceptable source if the other sources around it were better — but it's not enough sourcing to say that you're done. Bearcat (talk) 18:02, 18 August 2014 (UTC)