Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Brenda Leipsic (2nd nomination)


 * 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.  Sandstein  19:55, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Brenda Leipsic
AfDs for this article: 
 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Notability: no significant RS coverage can be found. An unremarkable city manager. Update (Aug 16, following discussions with Bearcat): The prior consensus was established with the understanding that Winnipeg was a global city (I've located the listing in the article on global cities, 2015 version). While acknowledging that consensus formerly accepted Winnipeg as one of the cities where a city councillor was accepted as notable under NPOL #2, I believe that it shouldn't anymore because Winnipeg is listed under "Category 6 (Sufficiency)". I believe this is insufficient to qualify it as a major international hub of business and political power, where a city councillor could be presumed to be notable: For comparison, other North American cities in the last category as Des Moines, Greensboro, Sacramento. K.e.coffman (talk) 22:10, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * 1) Alpha++ cities are London and New York City, which are vastly more integrated with the global economy than all other cities.
 * 2) Alpha+ cities complement London and New York City by filling advanced service niches for the global economy.
 * 3) Alpha and Alpha- cities are cities that link major economic regions into the world economy.
 * 4) Beta level cities are cities that link moderate economic regions into the world economy.
 * 5) Gamma level cities are cities that link smaller economic regions into the world economy.
 * 6) Sufficiency level cities are cities that have a sufficient degree of services so as not to be obviously dependent on world cities.


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 22:18, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Manitoba-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 22:18, 6 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete, not notable and only something of a passing or local interest at best. Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Kierzek (talk) 23:32, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Winnipeg has traditionally been one of the cities where serving on the city council is considered an adequate claim of notability to pass WP:NPOL, because it's in the global city category (admittedly the gamma, i.e. lowest, subclass of that club, but still in it.) And since the subject has not held office (or even still been alive) since 2008, significant coverage would not be expected to be locatable via Google News — rather, improving the sourcing would require digging into news databases like ProQuest. And neither does Wikipedia have any requirement that the news coverage be current or web-accessible — we can source stuff to print-only older newspaper content. Keep, and I'll take a stab at reffing it up via ProQuest in the next few days. Bearcat (talk) 18:31, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Following some discussion with K.e.coffman to clarify our respective issues, I see that he's now revising his nomination rationales to accommodate my primary concerns — as noted, I'm not wedded to the idea that Winnipeg's city councillors need to be kept as notable, but simply objected to the fact that some editors seemed willing to simply ignore the fact that the prior consensus ever existed at all. If any prior consensus could be erased simply by refusing to acknowledge that it existed, and didn't require any actual discussion and debate about the reasons why it should possibly be changed, Wikipedia would instantly become a giant pile of anarchy. An argument formulated this way, however, I can agree with: the "sufficiency" class of cities should not be considered notable enough to hand its city councillors an NPOL pass anymore, and Winnipeg is not for any substantive reason a city where broad national or international reader interest transcends its relatively low class of "globalness" the way a national capital might. Accordingly, I support the nomination as now formulated: my issue was the way in which the argument was being conducted as if no consensus for these ever existed in the first place, not any strong belief that Winnipeg should retain that status permanently. Bearcat (talk) 17:45, 16 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete City councilors at this level are not notable.John Pack Lambert (talk) 00:33, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep - barring a clear change in consensus, she was and is still notable. Bearian (talk) 23:48, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Noms comment: Consensus can change applies. Also, looking at the prior AfD, it appears that the argument was that they are presumed to be notable. But the actual notability still needs to be demonstrated via significant coverage in multiple RS. I just don't see those for the subject. None have been presented at this AfD either to meet GNG. No one is "automatically notable". K.e.coffman (talk) 17:38, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
 * As I noted at Mark Lubosch, a presumption of notability remains active until it can be definitively demonstrated that improved sourceability doesn't even exist. GNG does not depend on the quality of sourcing present in the article, but rather on the quality of sourcing that it's possible to locate — and in ProQuest's Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies, Brenda Leipsic gets 176 hits, which is more than enough (half of that would have been enough). And finally, as I also noted at Lubosch, while it's true that consensus can change, it changes by virtue of a discussion which establishes the new consensus, not by virtue of one user simply decreeing that the old consensus never existed in the first place. Bearcat (talk) 20:04, 10 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete Only for NYC and Chicago have we considered them necessarily notable, because of uniqueky large political roles in those two cities. There is no general consensus this applies anywhere else.  DGG ( talk ) 00:31, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * No, the consensus has never been that these are permissible only for New York City and Chicago and nowhere else; the consensus has always been that they're permissible for any city in the global city class. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Washington DC, Boston, London, Paris, Ottawa and San Diego, for starters, are just some other examples of cities where the city councillors do routinely have Wikipedia articles because city councillor in and of itself. If a new consensus can be established that Winnipeg should come off the list of cities whose councillors qualify, then that's one thing (and not even a thing I'd necessarily disagree with) — but past consensus was established that Winnipeg was on it, so you need to make a case for why Winnipeg should be removed from the established consensus, and can't get these deleted just by making false claims about what the existing consensus even is. Bearcat (talk) 17:27, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: I almost closed this as delete, but given that this would be a significant change from the previous AfD (which had some of the same particpants!), it's worth letting this run another week -- RoySmith (talk) 23:54, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Winnipeg City Council (by nom): Per DGG, it appears that the consensus has indeed changed in the intervening eight years. Indeed, I don't see Winnipeg on the list of Global cities; here's a ranking of top 40 cities from 2015: link. And we still don't know which (if any) substantial sources are available via ProQuest; these could be routine city business related announcements. As an option, I believe a redirect may be appropriate as the subject appears on the list in the target article. K.e.coffman (talk) 06:16, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, -- RoySmith (talk) 23:54, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - Serving on the City Council in Winnipeg is not significant enough to qualify for notability. Meatsgains (talk) 00:08, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment Winnipeg has well under 1 million people in its metro-area. I see no reason we should consider it to be a "global city" where all city council members are presumed notable. This is just not a truly internationally prominent city.John Pack Lambert (talk) 18:18, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
 * "Global city" status is not, in and of itself, dependent on population per se; a metropolitan area of more than a million people can be not a global city (cf. Indianapolis), and a metropolitan area of less than a million people can punch well above its population-weight for political or economic reasons. Whether you understand why or not, Winnipeg was listed in our article about global cities when that article actually contained a list, because it was sourceable as belonging to one of the classes of cities that were listed there — a case could certainly be made that the weakest classes of cities in those lists (the ones that were classed as not especially inspiring adjectives like "sufficiency", rather than as Greek letters) should be removed from the established consensus, but that's still a very different argument than simply denying that the established consensus ever existed in the first place or misrepresenting what cities it was deemed to cover (it was "any city listed in that article, regardless of class", not any specific arbitrary population cutoff.) And yes, the fact that the lists have since been removed from the article is in and of itself a reason why we should establish a consensus to formally define a new standard for inclusion, since we no longer have a set list to consult — but because "is listed in that article" was the consensus standard the last time one was agreed upon, "was listed in that article when that article contained lists" still has to stand until a consensus is established to set a different standard. Bearcat (talk) 17:06, 16 August 2016 (UTC)


 * 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.