Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Brian Graff


 * 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. Coverage appears to be highly localized or lacking in substantial detail about the subject. I, JethroBT drop me a line 09:15, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Brian Graff

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WP:BLP of a person notable only as a neighbourhood activist and non-winning city council candidate, which is not sourced to any substantive coverage of him as a topic in his own right — right across the board, every single source here is an invalid primary source, a community weekly newspaper which is not widely distributed enough to count toward getting the subject over WP:GNG, and/or an article which glancingly namechecks or blurbs his existence in the process of failing to be substantively about him. It's not impossible for topics of primarily local notability to get into Wikipedia, but this is not the level of sourcing it takes to get there — if this were Torontopedia, I might let it go, but nothing here is substantive or well-sourced enough, or of enough extralocal interest, to demonstrate that he warrants permanent coverage in an international encyclopedia. Delete. Bearcat (talk) 22:20, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 22:28, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 22:28, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

i am frustrated and find this whole system confusing- the "Community weekly newspaper is a bi-weekly that is delivered to about 25,000 homes in Toronto.

I have made a few edits to correct other things, but this is the 3rd time i tried to create something from scratch and feel like giving up. Signed: Doctor Bunsen — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doctorbunsen (talk • contribs) 05:02, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Community weekly newspapers, which are distributed exclusively locally and are not widely archived, are not sufficient sourcing to demonstrate that the topic is notable enough to warrant coverage in an encyclopedia. They can be sparingly used for some supplementary confirmation of facts after you've already covered off the notability issue with stronger sourcing, but they cannot be the foundation of the sourcing — if you're going for newspaper coverage, the foundation of the sourcing has to be daily newspapers in the Star, Sun, Globe & Mail, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, London Free Press, etc., range. One example of why the distinction matters is that if something ever happened which resulted in the Toronto Star or Globe and Mail websites becoming permanently lost, we would still have access to widely-available archives of their content in public libraries and news databases like ProQuest — so their content will always be verifiable in perpetuity regardless of what might happen to the publications themselves. But there are no comparable public archives of the Beach Metro Community News — so if it ever suffers a similar fate, those will simply become lost references that we can't recover any other way, and any information referenced to them will have to be removed from the article if we can't find replacement ones somewhere else.
 * What you need to keep in mind, if you want to avoid frustration in the future, is that Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. Your readership for any given article is not just your neighbour, who might be looking for information about Brian Graff or Gene Domagala because they're locally known — your readership also lives in Oslo and Johannesburg and Manila and Los Angeles and Edinburgh and Mumbai. So if you want an article to be kept, then please familiarize yourself with what constitutes notability for our purposes — local activism on local issues, sourced to local coverage in local community weekly newspapers, is not enough to demonstrate that a person is nationally or internationally noteworthy. Our goal is not to have an article about everybody who exists at all; it's to have articles about people whom a national and/or international audience has a serious reason to know or learn about. Bearcat (talk) 14:55, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. FuriouslySerene (talk) 14:19, 3 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete. I feel bad for Doctobunsen and others who have edited this article, but Bearcat is right, the coverage is awfully trivial. Even substantial coverage in Toronto newspapers could perhaps justify this article but none of the sources are about Graff, they just tangentially mention him. There's simply not enough sources to create an article about him, unless more can be uncovered. FuriouslySerene (talk) 14:23, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

I added a couple of extra links - and there are others I could have added but they relate to the election campaign or I can't really work in. I disagree with the comments about this being an international resource and therefore local things are of no interest - the thing is that there is no Canadapedia or Torontopedia and if someone is looking up something about Toronto where else are they going to find information... were I to move to another Canadian city and wanted to know the local history I would check here first. I also think it useful to provide information about defeated candidates - somebody looking at the race will find information on the winner but knowing who they defeated provides context and information about that race. I don't have access to Proquest (never heard of it before) or Lexisnexis, but a lot of what goes on this days is not in major newpapers, and even those things are going on line - same goes for tv coverage which is now online but videos of cbc or city-tv other local stations will get lost. In future a lot of materials will be lost just as we have lost most of the silent movies and we only have secondary information about them. Is wikipedia so hard up for storage space that articles need to be deleted and the work that went into them lost? Why spend time creating something when there might be a high risk that it won't be considered notable enough to be accepted? It would seem to me that if things are reported in something like a community paper and it is not in ProQuest or whatever that Wikipedia becomes even more important as the information will be duplicated and thus this only summarises what can be found elsewhere or is only found in local libraries. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doctorbunsen (talk • contribs) 08:29, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

also - i looked at the new mP for the area and what info there is about him - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Erskine-Smith - other than the elections canada numbers the information comes from a TV stations website and from the liberal party website - neither of those pages are likely to exist on the internet with that information in 5 years — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doctorbunsen (talk • contribs) 09:11, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Elected MPs are a topic that reliable sources do cover quite regularly and extensively — so even if the article looks inadequate at first when he's newly elected, it will become more extensively sourceable over the course of his career. So no, you're not making a valid comparison to an analogous situation. Bearcat (talk) 19:39, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

a lot of politicians that are elected, like backbenchers, often are not quoted except in local/community newspapers... take this former Toronto Councillor: http://www.metronews.ca/views/opinion/2015/10/29/which-voting-system-should-canada-use.html or a few current ones have very thin articles with no major newspapers cited, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(Ontario_politician) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Di_Giorgio — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doctorbunsen (talk • contribs) 23:09, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Incorrect; all elected federal MPs always get major media coverage of some kind. They may not all get the same volume of it as a cabinet minister does, but no elected federal MP or provincial MPP ever goes entirely uncovered by any mainstream daily newspaper or television station or radio news operation at all. "Quoted" has nothing to do with it, because "quoted in coverage of other things" isn't what gets a person into Wikipedia — being the subject of media coverage is what gets a person into Wikipedia. And no elected MP ever fails to be the subject of coverage — regardless of how often they are or aren't quoted as a provider of a soundbite in an article that isn't about them, that's not the only kind of coverage that a politician can garner. And it's still an invalid comparison to a non-analogous situation — a person who has held a notable political office is automatically in a different galaxy of notability and sourceability than an unelected candidate for a notable office is; actual MPs are a thing that a large number people will be looking for information about, while unsuccessful candidates for a city council seat are not. Bearcat (talk) 15:12, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 12:59, 8 November 2015 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sam Sailor Talk! 01:10, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete If anything he has done might be worth mentioning it would be in an article in the sub-area of Toronto where he is active.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:34, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Non-notable local figure. Graham (talk) 04:56, 19 November 2015 (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.

it is incredibly disheartening that the work i did is deleted and there is no record of it or means of taking the information for use elsewhere- and another article i drafted has similarly facing difficulties.

frankly, i feel like giving up on this entirely... what is the harm in publishing articles that are reasonable and of local interest? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doctorbunsen (talk • contribs) 02:37, 8 December 2015 (UTC)