Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bridget Mearns


 * 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 and redirect to 2021 Lethbridge municipal election. The Blade of the Northern Lights ( 話して下さい ) 12:19, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Bridget Mearns

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Semi-advertorialized WP:BLP of a person notable only as an as yet non-winning candidate for mayor of a city. As always, people do not get Wikipedia articles just for running as candidates in elections they have not won -- the notability test at WP:NPOL is holding a notable office, not just running for one. But there's no other strong notability claim here that would have gotten her into Wikipedia independently of a candidacy, and the referencing is a mix of primary sourcing, one local news article that just soundbites her opinions on an issue without being about her in any significant way, and a small smattering of purely local campaign coverage that is not sufficient to get her over WP:GNG all by itself. Nothing here is enough to deem her already notable today, and Wikipedia is not a free public relations platform for election candidates to republish their campaign brochures. Bearcat (talk) 15:30, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 15:30, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Alberta-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 15:30, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 16:30, 5 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Comment - if possible, instead of deleting, would it be better to merge some of the content with Bridget Pastoor? There is also some more coverage that could be used for sourcing - like CTV Calgary, Global News in 2014, and Global News in 2017, NHCLS (talk) 15:17, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep With 6 years as councillor of one of the biggest cities in the province, a city of over 100,000, I think she does meet NPOL given the amount of province-wide references I can find about her from 2010 to 2017 in a simple Proquest search. And that's without the recent coverage as a 2021 mayoral candidate! She's hardly a fringe candidate, finishing second with 30% of the vote in the 2013 Lethbridge municipal election. At a minimum it should be a redirect to 2021 Lethbridge municipal election. Nfitz (talk) 02:08, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The rule for the notability of city councillors isn't "six years in a city of over 100,000 gets her in"; it's "either she served on the city council of an internationally prominent global city or bust". The rule for the notability of candidates isn't "people who finished second with 30 per cent of the vote are in and only lunatic fringe candidates are out" — it's "no non-winning candidate ever gets an article just for being a candidate at all, unless she has some other valid claim of preexisting notability for other reasons independent of an unsuccessful candidacy". And when I search her on ProQuest, I don't get GNG-building coverage about her, I just get a bunch of glancing namechecks of her existence in coverage of other things, almost entirely in the Lethbridge Herald itself with little evidence of the sort of unusually wide coverage beyond the Lethbridge area that it would take to make her more special than other Lethbridge municipal councillors. Bearcat (talk) 23:11, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
 * WP:NPOL says no such thing. Please don't make up policies to support your AFD, User:Bearcat. It simply says that "Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage" are notable. Nfitz (talk) 04:06, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't make stuff up. I am entirely correct about AFD's established consensus around how the notability of local political figures works: since every municipal councillor in every city always receives local press coverage in their local media, our entire consensus that not all local politicians are "inherently" notable enough for Wikipedia articles would be completely meaningless if all a municipal councillor had to do to pass the bar was show that a handful of run of the mill local coverage of local politics exists. So the notability test for a municipal councillor is not "has she gotten her name into her own city's local newspaper?", precisely because not a single city councillor in the history of city councils has ever failed to achieve that — it requires evidence that she's markedly more notable than most other city councillors, such as by getting nationalized coverage in The Globe and Mail. It requires evidence that she's a special case, not just evidence that she exists as a city councillor. Not because I said so, either, but because virtually every AFD we've ever had on a city councillor said so whether I was the nominator of it or not. See also WP:POLOUTCOMES, which clarifies our notability standard for municipal councillors in much more detail than the generic Coles Notes version at NPOL. Bearcat (talk) 04:16, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
 * You mislead us by claiming that what is stated at WP:POLOUTCOMES is a rule; it is not, it's merely an essay. NPOL says significant press coverage. We've long-since supported the significant coverage can be local, not national. But wait, there is national coverage, such at this. There's even brief mentions in major non-Albertan publications like the Toronto Star! Nfitz (talk) 17:42, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't say it's misleading because WP:POLOUTCOMES does accurately reflect longstanding practice and consensus across hundreds if not thousands of similar AFDs, and is frequently quoted and cited in similar AFDs and is widely respected among active regular volunteers at AFD. As such, it articulates common practice at AFD and puts words to what is essentially the unofficial guide to how we have historically applied NPOL at AFD. Is it a policy or official rule, no. Is it commonly accepted practice that is typically enforced by rulings at AFD, yes.4meter4 (talk) 18:56, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * POLOUTCOMES is an accurate assessment of longstanding consensus around how the notability of politicians is actually measured in cases of debate. Again, every city councillor in every city can always show enough local press coverage to claim that they've passed NPOL #2 — but we have a longstanding consensus that we don't want to indiscriminately maintain articles about every city councillor in every city. So the notability test for a city councillor is not just "some local press coverage exists", and does require a reason why she could be considered much, much more special than most other city councillors. Also, brief mentions don't help to build WP:GNG. She isn't the subject of that Toronto Star source, but just has her name mentioned a single time in an article that isn't about her at all, so that article does absolutely nothing whatsoever to help bolster notability. Bearcat (talk) 18:53, 17 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep WP:NPOL fn 8 includes A politician who has received "significant press coverage" has been written about, in depth, independently in multiple news feature articles, by journalists, so per the sources found by, i.e. Bigger and more interesting: Former councillor in the running for Lethbridge's mayor (CTV Calgary, 2021, including a focus on the significance of her running to become the first woman mayor), Bridget Mearns elected: What it means for Lethbridge city council (Global News, 2014, including her political career background), ‘It was an honour’: Lethbridge councillor stepping down after two terms in office (Global News 2017, more career background), both WP:NPOL and WP:GNG/WP:BASIC appear to be met; there is also local news that includes a focus on the significance of her run to become the first female mayor (Lethbridge News, 2021). She also has coverage in her role as executive officer of BILD Lethbridge, e.g. Global News, 2019. Beccaynr (talk) 04:34, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete. Fails WP:NPOL and WP:SIGCOV. Long standing consensus at AFD is that city councilors aren't notable, and that all regional/local press is considered unusable towards RS per WP:ROUTINE, WP:NOTNEWS, and WP:LOCAL because essentially press coverage of city councilors in their city/province lack's sufficient independence to establish notability. Further, most of the wider press coverage is on a failed political campaign to run as mayor of Lethbridge. Longstanding practice at AFD is that all mayoral candidates and elected mayors in most places other than cities much larger than Lethbridge (like New York City, Los Angeles, and comparable major cities of millions of people) are also not inherently notable; so even if she had won this election she would not pass under NPOL. Not seeing how a reasonable argument could be made using NPOL as a rationale given past precedent on how this guideline has historically been implemented in regards to city councilors, mayors, and candidates for mayor wikipedia wide. I don't think we should overturn precedent now.4meter4 (talk) 03:00, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment The WP:LOCAL essay states, An article about a local place or person may be created if there is enough referenced information to make it encyclopedic and this appears to be possible here, because there is WP:SUSTAINED and in-depth coverage focused on Mearns, including from news outlets beyond the municipality where she has held political office, worked, and is now running for political office again. And to the extent it may be relevant, the recent coverage is not about a failed political campaign to run as mayor, because Election Day is October 18, 2021 (City of Lethbridge), and past AfD precedent has found the topic of first women mayors to be notable. Beccaynr (talk) 04:26, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, but historically we require media with national or international coverage to make a city councilor notable, not local or regional. So WP:LOCAL still applies since the sources are considered ROUTINE and trivial. As for first woman mayors, she hasn't won yet and this would still not be a reasonable rationale to keep currently per WP:CRYSTAL and WP:TOOSOON. A draftify would be reasonable under the circumstances, and providing she wins, the article could then be moved into main space after the election.4meter4 (talk) 17:59, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * But Global News is national coverage for her career as a city councilor, so it appears per this reasoning that a standalone article is currently supported, including because the coverage is specifically focused on her and her career and its significance. From my view, the additional more recent reporting helps support WP:BASIC notability as well. None of the sources in my comment appear to be WP:ROUTINE, because they cover far more than such things as announcements [...] press conferences etc. and instead provide an in-depth focus on Mearns. It further appears that independent and reliable sources consider her mayoral campaign sufficiently "worthy of notice" to cover in-depth with WP:SECONDARY context, so even if she does not win, these sources appear to add further support to her notability per the guidelines. Beccaynr (talk) 18:22, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * We would need three such sources of similar quality, not a single source, to justify an article. Please understand that this is the typical measuring stick applied at AFD across hundreds of similar AFD discussions on city councilors, mayors, and other politicians at the city and county/regional level for over the last 15 years. We have a higher than normal threshold because most local/regional press is discounted as too closely connected to the subject to count towards GNG/BASIC/NPOL for municipal political figures. It's very rare to find articles on city councilors or even mayors for a city the size of Lethbridge or even five times the size of Lethbridge. For the most part, we don't even have articles on city councilors for major world cities like New York or Toronto. Best.4meter4 (talk) 18:31, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It appears there are articles for every current member of the New York City Council and Toronto City Council, and as to local journalism, I think each source should be evaluated as to whether it is WP:INDEPENDENT on its own merits, e.g. is it reprinting a press release, or uncritically reporting an announcement or speech, etc., instead of automatically dismissed. Beccaynr (talk) 20:02, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The Global News hit is from Global's local station in Lethbridge, not from the national news division, so it does not reify into "nationalized" coverage for the purposes of making a city councillor in Lethbridge more notable than city councillors in other cities the size of Lethbridge. Just because most of the Canadian television networks publish the local coverage from their local stations on subsections of the network's common website rather than separate standalone websites for each individual station does not mean that all Canadian local television coverage automatically turns into "nationalized" coverage — the local vs. national distinction still applies and is still easily determined, you just have to look in different places to find out which type of coverage it is than you would look in the US. (For example, the author of the source is Tom Roulston, who is a local journalist at Global's local news bureau in Lethbridge and not a national reporter for Global National.) Whether you agree with it or not, we have a longstanding consensus that city councillors in global cities like New York City and Toronto are accepted as notable precisely because of the city's global status, while city councillors in non-global cities are not notable unless they can be demonstrably shown to be special cases of significantly greater notability than other non-global city councillors. So the fact that you can find NYC or Toronto city councillors whose articles aren't citing anything more than local sourcing doesn't mean anything, because the bar for global city councillors is different from the bar for most other city councillors. Bearcat (talk) 18:48, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 10:58, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete and Redirect to 2021 Lethbridge municipal election. Reads like campaign brochure, promotional and glowing. It's hard to see a usable article after all the NPOV or promotional material is removed. This is on top of Bearcat's arguments on notability (i.e. Lethbridge is not Toronto/Calgary). Bkissin (talk) 14:05, 14 September 2021 (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.