Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) candidates in the 2007 Ontario provincial election


 * 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. Spartaz Humbug! 06:27, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) candidates in the 2007 Ontario provincial election

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Lack of notability Creuzbourg (talk) 20:35, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Articles for deletion/Log/2022 April 4.  —cyberbot I   Talk to my owner :Online 20:45, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Lists of people, Politics,  and Ontario.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 20:50, 4 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep I've just revamped this article in accordance with current standards for candidate list pages. I"ll grant that this particular page may be of little interest to most readers, but it's part of a larger series of candidate pages, covering mainstream and fringe parties of the past and present. The pages provide a service to readers and researchers in the sense of listing the occupations of candidates, allowing for a quick comparison of votes and percentages, etc. CJCurrie (talk) 22:34, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete or redirect The revised article merely duplicates Results of the 2007 Ontario general election by riding. I see no reason to have redundancy to that article just to list occupations of non-notable election losers. Reywas92Talk 23:00, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete. Results of the 2007 Ontario general election by riding is quite sufficient. Note: Even the major parties' (Liberals, PC, etc.) candidate lists all redirect to the results page. Clarityfiend (talk) 03:59, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per Clarityfiend. Odd and out of place to have such a separate article carved out for one relatively minor party. BD2412  T 06:07, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment This discussion is focusing on (i) the fact that other candidates pages for the 2007 Ontario provincial election are redirects to the general results page, and (ii) the argument that the list pages simply duplicate the information on the results page. It's technically correct that the other pages are redirects, but that's only because one particular editor (User:Reywas92) redirected all of the pages in question after this afd was posted. Until a short time ago, they were also separate list pages. There was no discussion about turning them into redirects, and they could be turned into separate pages again. The second point is not correct: these articles contain supplementary information (e.g., occupation information, comparative votes and percentages) not included in the main article pages.
 * This debate has come up before, for instance on Articles for deletion/Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario candidates in the 2003 Ontario provincial election (where there was no ultimately no consensus, and no mandate for editors who disagree with the existence of these pages to seek to remove them all). I'll readily admit, once again, that the subject of this afd will not be of any particular interest to most readers -- its main value is as part of a larger set. Previous candidate list page afds have always ended with the article pages being kept. I have some concerns about the idea of revisiting the larger issue with a standalone afd on the candidates of a smaller party. CJCurrie (talk) 06:54, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Results of the 2007 Ontario general election by riding does have both comparative votes and percentages. It's also "techincally correct" that the list pages I redirected were merely duplicates. They were junk articles that provided no additional benefit. Reywas92Talk 13:08, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * It has the basic information; it doesn't have sortable tables. That makes a difference. CJCurrie (talk) 13:12, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * But no one gives a shit about the occupation about the people who got less than 1% of the vote in a regional election. That's not encyclopedic. Even for major parties this isn't information we should be compiling in this way.
 * "Occupation of candidate" is a standard part of election reporting and it has encyclopedic value. Is an argument against the encyclopedic merit of (to use my example from below) listing the occupations of Liberal candidates from 1945? CJCurrie (talk) 14:05, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Btw, I'll meet you halfway on one point: some of the specific pages you redirected were not particularly informative -- they were just lists of candidates. That's why I haven't brought them back in their previous form. But that's an argument for improving the pages, not deleting or merging them. CJCurrie (talk) 14:07, 5 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions. CJCurrie (talk) 06:58, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment Its an obious lack of notability that is the problem, nothing else. If its kept, I will start writing articles about every second-lieutenant that ever served in the American Civil War. Creuzbourg (talk) 12:51, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * A question: would a Wikipedia article listing the occupations of, say, Liberal Party of Canada candidates in the 1945 Canadian federal election (the number of lawyers, farmers, business executives, military officials, etc. etc. etc.) be of encyclopedic value? I'd say that it would. So too would having a means of sorting the percentage of votes that each candidate received.
 * I'll repeat this point as often as is necessary: I realize that this particular article will be of no particular interest to most readers. Its main value is as part of a larger set. And, as I've said, I have concerns about revisiting the larger issue of candidate list pages with a standalone afd on the candidates of a minor party. CJCurrie (talk) 12:59, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * No. Why does this need to be split out by party? An overall list of candidates could potentially do this, but duplicative pages just to put this in tablular form is not necessary. The main Results of the 2007 Ontario general election by riding could even be reformatted to have percentages in a separate column to be sortable without splitting by party; I don't see that as particularly valuable either but it's better in context of all the results than for just a single party. Reywas92Talk 13:27, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * If you're in favour of listing the information in a different format, I'm open to suggestions. "Listing by party" seemed like the most obvious choice when these pages were created. CJCurrie (talk) 14:05, 5 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete – Notability. The number of votes they received speaks to their notability. The only person on that list with a wikipage is the person who lead the party from 2016 to 2019. The other eventual leaders on that list haven't even had a page made yet.Hey man im josh (talk) 13:39, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. Merging this list would result in the removal of some information (namely the candidate's professions), so a stand alone article is fine with me.-- Earl Andrew - talk 14:10, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete. What's important and enduringly notable about these people is their vote totals, which are already present in the election's main results table as it is — their occupations at the time of the election are (a) not significant information that would pass the ten year test for enduring historical importance, and (b) supported entirely by the party's own self-published primary sourcing rather than reliable source media coverage. There's just nothing historically important about the fact that Bob Mann was a retired steelworker and Drew Garvie was a student; that's just biographical trivia about non-notable people, not information that the historical record needs to preserve for posterity in anything like the same way we need information about the backgrounds of the actual elected MPPs. The additional problem with these lists (for all parties) is that a lot of the older ones that were created before the consensus changed to preclude full BLP-style mini-articles about each individual candidate were never revised to the table-only format, and thus are still in the old deprecated format — which is, in and of itself, evidence that the biographies of non-winning election candidates are simply not of enduring historical importance, because editors would have gone back to them to fix them if they cared. Bearcat (talk) 14:26, 8 April 2022 (UTC)
 * To your last point, I'll note that I proposed moving the old-format pages to Drafts a while ago. The idea didn't really go anywhere at the time, but it's still an option now. I don't agree that something ceases to have encyclopedic value just because it hasn't been updated yet.
 * I'll pose the same question here that I posed above: would you agree that a listing of the occupations of Liberal Party candidates from the 1945 general election has encyclopedic merit? I would contend that it does. I've read several scholarly books and articles on the history of political parties that make use of this type of information (sometimes well more than ten years after the election in question is over). A review of the relative number of lawyers, farmers, entrepreneurs, academics, union officials (and so on) among a party's candidates can reveal quite a bit about its base of support, appeal, etc. – and many serious writers have made use of this information for this specific purpose.
 * The article under discussion in this afd falls within the same informational framework – albeit only in a very small way. I continue to hold the view that the encyclopedic merit of the article is higher than zero, though I can understand how it wouldn't seem particularly noteworthy on its own, and I'm increasingly thinking that having standalone articles for every party in each election doesn't make sense in the way that it used to.
 * This discussion has gone back and forth between this particular candidate list page and candidate list pages generally. If we're going to consider the broader question of list pages, I would suggest that it be done in a forum specifically dedicated to that subject. CJCurrie (talk) 01:50, 9 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to general information about the percentages of occupational representation in any particular party's candidate slate — however, that information would have to be supported by outside sources having already done the research and published the breakdowns for us, rather than to us trying to original research the statistics ourselves — but I definitely don't agree that there would be any discernible value in Wikipedia trying to retain a comprehensive list of every individual occupation held by every individual candidate including the defeated ones, not even for the Liberals in 1945. Bearcat (talk) 17:26, 10 April 2022 (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.