Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Contentious ridings in the Canadian federal election, 2011


 * 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. -- Cirt (talk) 03:25, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Contentious ridings in the Canadian federal election, 2011

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Contested prod. Per discussion at Talk:Contentious ridings in the Canadian federal election, 2011, the basic problem here is that this serves as a record of the conventional wisdom that was in place before election day — basically relying on media analysis of "ridings to watch" that was published during the campaign — but falls flat on its ass the moment you try to compare it to anything that actually happened on election day.

Neither the Conservatives nor the New Democrats, for example, succeeded in winning even half of their supposed "target" seats — and yet both parties significantly overperformed in seats that weren't considered viable "targets" before the election began; the NDP, in particular, took just seven of their 15 official "target" seats, and yet won about 60 seats in which conventional wisdom was expecting them to finish completely off the radar. In other words, they won just short of nine times as many seats that aren't listed here as they did seats that are. The Liberals, meanwhile, not only failed to take any of their "target" seats, but completely failed to win a single seat in the entire country, "target" or not, that they didn't already hold before the election started. And for their part, the Greens have two "target" seats listed here, and won one of them — but the one they actually won is listed here as an artificial "special case", i.e. sink maximum resources into getting the leader a seat, which doesn't actually meet any of the criteria listed at the top of the article as defining a conventional "target seat".

So, basically, this article is applying conventional wisdom to a transformational wave election which literally ate the stuffing out of conventional wisdom — it tells you a whole lot about things that didn't happen, and almost nothing about things that did, and consequently it can never be a helpful article for future students of the Canadian federal election, 2011 to actually peruse. It's a record of what the pundits were predicting might happen, but it will never be able to provide a useful analysis of what actually did happen. Delete. Bearcat (talk) 23:59, 23 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment - I hate the title of this. "Contentious" ridings implies that someone is passing editorial judgement on which particular ridings are competitive and which are not, which is pretty much the definition of Original Research in the bad, verboten sort of way. Carrite (talk) 00:24, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * That's exactly it — the only concession to neutrality here is that it's not strictly our own editorial judgement, but a compilation of other sources' editorial judgements. And there's nothing particularly notable about that in principle. Bearcat (talk) 00:33, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Yeah, the thing that tears me, my friend, is that there actually is such a thing as "competitive" electoral districts and this isn't terrible political science. Which is why I weeble and wobble in the wind on the Keep or Delete question. No opinion at this point. Carrite (talk) 00:46, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * That's true. But the problem here is that the majority of the electoral districts that were actually competitive in this election were not the ones that were predicted to be competitive districts before the election. This is a list of the latter, following an election in which the former and the latter bore so little relation to each other that a list of the latter is simply useless trivia. Bearcat (talk) 01:07, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Screw it, Keep. This is a list, pretty clearly defined, and sourced, but I totally understand where this nomination is coming from. Carrite (talk) 00:48, 24 May 2011 (UTC) Last edit: Carrite (talk) 15:01, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions.  — Logan Talk Contributions 00:54, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete. With the political shift that this election saw, the ridings that were close in the last election, weren't in this one. 117Avenue (talk) 03:22, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete - the essential problem with this article is that it's essentially a meta-analysis of news from sometime before 9:30PM EST on 2 May 2011. By roughly an hour later, everything in this article was outdated. WP:NOTNEWS seems to apply here, in addition to Bearcat's summary above. → ROUX   ₪  10:48, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete. The list that's provided was pro-forma; there is no indication about whether or not the results were close in each case.  A better idea would have been a list of ridings that turned out to be close when the smoke of the battle cleared.   PK  T (alk)  15:22, 29 May 2011 (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.