Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David Risstrom (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. Being a local municipal official or a failed candidate doesn't necessary mean that the subject fails WP:GNG, but ultimately it appears that he just barely falls short. No new sources have been presented, so we have to go with what is in the article; the recent article in The Age appears to be the best one but consensus is against regarding it as sufficient to meet GNG. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 03:08, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

David Risstrom
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Fails WP:GNG, WP:POLITICIAN and WP:ONEEVENT. Inconclusive discussion at WP:AWNB. Scott Davis Talk 13:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions. Scott Davis Talk 13:10, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Scott Davis Talk 13:10, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. Icewhiz (talk) 13:45, 3 March 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. The title "City of Melbourne councillor" isn't what it sounds like — the City of Melbourne is the local government area (what readers in Canada, the United States or the UK would understand as a borough councillor below the level of the entire city) for downtown Melbourne, not the governing body of Melbourne as a whole. So he's not a "city councillor in a global city" for the purposes of WP:POLOUTCOMES, he's a person who would have to pass the "highly sourceable as much more notable than the norm for his level of significance" test. And being a non-winning candidate in a federal election is not a notability criterion either, so that's not in and of itself enough to get him over the special case bar. As for the argument in the AWNB thread that his candidacy was itself a special case of greater notability than most other candidates, even that condition isn't passed just because somebody asserts it — it's passed only if and when the sources properly support it by exploding significantly out of proportion to what every other non-winning candidate can also show. But with just two media sources and a raw table of election results, that's not nearly enough sourcing to get him there. No prejudice against recreation after election day 2019 if he wins his seat, but nothing present here is convincing evidence that he's already notable enough today. Bearcat (talk) 16:05, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Cavalryman V31 (talk) 18:48, 3 March 2019 (UTC).
 * Delete per nom and Bearcat. Kirbanzo (userpage - talk - contribs) 22:29, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Simply a low level political personality that did not get over the the election line to date for routine reasons and hence does not get over the GNG line either. Aoziwe (talk) 22:52, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Not notable in his own right, has only been near notable events. I would like the administrator who deletes the article to send it to my user space. The subject could potentially become notable, and not just by becoming an elected politician. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:44, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete, with some regret. Bearcat is correct that the City of Melbourne is just for the CBD; however, Melbourne city councillors (like Sydney city councillors) do often get a lot more coverage in the statewide press than your average local councillor or even mayor. Having said that, I just can't see the coverage in this case, and the 2004 result was dramatic but doesn't lend any notability to Risstrom himself. Happy to reconsider if significantly more sources are added than I have been able to find (I'm aware that there may be some significant sources offline). Frickeg (talk) 06:40, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I found over 500 articles discussing Risstrom. It doesn't necessarily appear in Google because he's had a lower profile for the last decade and all Google coverage of Australian newspapers is rubbish before about 2006, as you'd well know. It just means somebody has to hit the newspaper databases to do a good rewrite. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 06:46, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. Firstly, he was a city councillor in a "global city" for the purposes of WP:POLOUTCOMES: the argument that that guideline doesn't apply to Australian cities is nonsense. Secondly, I almost always vote delete on unelected political candidates and have for years, but this is not a routine case - his particular Senate defeat was in uniquely controversial circumstances, is still frequently referenced fifteen years later, and has the hundreds of sources you'd expect from that. As I said in the initial discussion, this was always going to come down to whether people judged notability on the actual sources available, or on the sources people imagined existed having heard the mere fact of him having been an unsuccessful political candidate. We don't judge notability at AfD by the sources in the article, we judge it by the sources that exist, and this just needs somebody to do a thorough rewrite from the 500+ available articles about him. He was always notable, as reflected in the last AfD: he's only being nominated this time because of the assumption of non-notability for political candidates regardless of WP:GNG and WP:POLOUTCOMES. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 06:46, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I think this argument about drawing notability from the 2004 election is very misguided. Putting aside how unusual or not the election was, the coverage was not about him. When it comes to Wayne Dropulich who was elected (but later voided) from 0.2% of first preferences, or Albert Field who was a nobody who stumbled into becoming a senator for two months, there was media interest in who these people were. Reliable sources had the style of "who exactly is this Wayne Dropulich??" which simply wasn't something that was asked about David Risstrom since he lost. If Risstrom won that election then that event could have made him notable enough for an article, but then he would be notable as an elected politician anyway. If it takes pre-2006 articles to substantiate notability, then we're not only looking at newspaper articles but academic sources as well. That's why I think the article should be somewhere in some form because it's possible he will be notable at some point in the future, regardless of elections. Frickeg is right to say that CBD councillors are usually more notable, but that notability would then be shown in the reliable sources and not assumed from being a councillor. That said, if there's something about him that we don't know, then let's reconsider deleting the article. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:00, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * There's a hell of a lot more in reliable sources about Risstrom than there ever will be about Dropulich. There's a reason all we know about Dropulich as a person is that he is a "Perth-based civil engineer and mining project manager who used to work for Rio Tinto" and that he is "a former gridiron player for the Australian representative team". That's probably all we'll ever know - but he's safe because of the quirks of {[WP:NPOL]]. Yet Risstrom, who we can say quite a lot more about referenced to reliable sources, winds up here instead because of the unsuccessful-or-current-candidate-kiss-of-death despite objectively passing WP:GNG. As you state, CBD councillors are usually more notable - and Risstrom has the solid coverage in reliable sources that comes with that. It just, like a great many others, is not currently in the article because no one has bothered to put it there: no assumptions are required if you look at the sources that really, factually exist instead of assuming without evidence that every past unsuccessful candidate or current candidate must have not much. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 09:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * It's not about how much information there is about someone. As someone else said, there may be a lot of information about an ordinary member of the public simply because of social media. Dropulich is clearly just a more private person than Risstrom, that doesn't make him less notable. There is likely much more written about Risstrom than Albert Field, the 1975 senator from Queensland, but clearly Albert Field is a more notable person. Risstrom is really on the verge of being notable, while Dropulich and others are just on the opposite side of that line. It's not as if Dropulich is actually less notable than Risstrom but we're forced to have an article about him because of NPOL. Onetwothreeip (talk) 10:43, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I did not make the nomination based on an "assumption" that he is non-notable because he failed in an election. I made it because there is nothing in the article to demonstrate that he is notable under any criteria. If councillors other than mayor and deputy mayor of the City of Melbourne were implicitly assumed to be notable, there'd be a sea of red links instead of black names in the list of current councillors, and another subcategory of Category:City of Melbourne for the non-mayoral members. As it happens, Dropulich could quite possibly survive AFD on the grounds of having been a "gridiron player for the Australian representative team" - if that actually involved playing international matches. I'm quite open to the idea of changing the notability guidelines if you think they set the bar too high for Melbourne councillors. My understanding is that Risstrom (the person) was not significant in the 2004 election. It could have been anyone as the Greens candidate. If the outcome was only because Risstrom was the Greens candidate not Joe Bloggs, then the articles should reflect that. --Scott Davis Talk 10:38, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I think it's fair to look at councillors being the subject of articles, but all councillors (including CBD councillors) who have Wikipedia articles are notable for something else other than being councillors. Can anybody here name any city councillors who haven't been anything more than councillors? Onetwothreeip (talk) 10:43, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * We actually have quite a bunch of them, but I'm not going to highlight them to people who are in a mood for trying to whack articles on notable topics. The suggestion that we would need to change notability guidelines to allow city councillor articles is a sleight of hand: WP:NPOL explicitly allows this, and it's only a couple of users here arguing that it uniquely doesn't apply to Australian global city councils. I honestly don't think there's a capital city councillor that, given decent digitised coverage of their era, I couldn't write a decent article on - but there's only so much I'm willing to swim upstream in the face of people who will vote delete regardless of the damn coverage. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 02:06, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I've been holding out for as long as I could to see if there was a proper claim to notability for David Risstrom since I am usually hesitant about deleting articles, but all we've been shown is the 2004 election loss and being a former councillor. I'm not sure why you give so much importance to the City of Melbourne local council since I'm sure you're aware that it only has about 100,000 residents. If there are other notable councillors, I'm willing to help write those articles. Given there's been hundreds of councillors over the history of the City of Melbourne, we can't seriously say that they're all notable. Onetwothreeip (talk) 02:31, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Capital city councillors are regularly discussed in the metropolitan dailies all the time, and have been since the city councils were a thing. They get drastically higher coverage than suburban councillors and always have. I'm absolutely not exaggerating when I say that I could write notable articles about all of them provided all the newspapers of their era are digitised. The available sources are exactly on par with the other cities at the level protected by the existing wording of WP:NPOL. That's why I give importance to it - but no one is ever going to bother to put serious work into fleshing out topics with an axe constantly hanging over the head of their work, and why areas likely to be hit by random arbitrary AfDs regardless of sourcing are generally in such bad shape. All the actual media coverage in the world doesn't matter if a handful of users inevitably insist that Australian councillors are low-profile and should be deleted regardless of it. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 02:41, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Surely if all councillors of capital cities are notable enough there would be many more articles about them. There are definitely people who would be bothered to make articles about them, the subjects themselves. I would like to see an example of the Herald Sun or The Age discussing Risstrom as a councillor, because so far that evidence hasn't been forthcoming. Onetwothreeip (talk) 05:26, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * That's the second time that The Drover's Wife has accused me of voting delete on principal for failed candidates and city councillors. I'm pretty sure my record would say otherwise, and I often try to fix articles before throwing up my hands and proposing their deletion instead. I have no doubt that some city councillors satisfy WP:GNG and WP:BIO. They do not automatically fit WP:POLITICIAN whether we like it or not. I did not say "...we would need to change notability guidelines to allow city councillor articles...", I said I'm quite open to the idea of changing the notability guidelines if you think they set the bar too high for Melbourne councillors. which is to say we would need to change the guideline to automatically assume that Melbourne (or any other city) councillors are notable purely through being elected. WP:POLOUTCOMES says that {[tq|precedent has tended to favor keeping members of the main citywide government of internationally famous metropolitan areas}} so this AFD has the opportunity to demonstrate that Risstrom has made a sufficient impact through his five years on the City of Melbourne council. The article currently does not mention that he did anything other than be Green, get re-elected, and resign. --Scott Davis Talk 03:39, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * The Drover's Wife, if you want to use the argument we judge notability by the existence of suitable sources and not just the quality of sources present in the article as a reason to keep an article that's under discussion, you need to keep in mind that it's not enough to just say that — you need show hard proof that the quality and depth of sourcing needed to get him over the bar actually exists. If you were trying to stake his notability on something that happened last week or last year, then yes, everybody in the discussion could easily just type his name into Google News — but if his strongest claim to potential notability occurred 15 years ago, then the media coverage it would take to get him over the bar won't Google, and will have to be retrieved from archives that not everybody has access to. So for a person whose primary notability claim predates Google News, most people can really, truly only judge based on the state of sourcing present in the article — not because those users are being negligent, but because they don't have access to the resources to even try to look anywhere else. I, for example, only have access to Canadian media archiving databases — if a topic requires archived American or British or Australian coverage instead of Canadian, then I literally can't do a damn thing. But we don't simply hand every article a free assumption that better referencing exists, either — we evaluate the media coverage that people actually show. So if you're so sure that enough media coverage actually exists to make him notable, then you need to show some actual evidence and not attack other people for not finding sources they don't have the ability to even try to find. Bearcat (talk) 13:36, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't think The Drover's Wife has attacked anybody. Onetwothreeip (talk) 20:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * He's got over 500 newspaper hits to work with. I don't particularly have the time for that kind of rewrite now, and I'm particularly reluctant to do it because the assumption of non-notability for people who are current candidates for parliament or who have previously been unsuccessful candidates is so strong I could write an WP:FA on the bloke and some people would still be itching to delete it. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 02:09, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * That's just five hundred times of being mentioned though. It's disingenuous to suggest that people think the article should be deleted because he's a non-incumbent candidate. We're all aware that his notability is purported to be related to being a local councillor and his connection to the 2004 senate election. Maybe it's happened before but it's clearly not happening here. Onetwothreeip (talk) 02:31, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * keep nothing has emerged that undoes what has been well established, the person was notable before the recent news, any one of the recent stories makes him double-double notable and this was clearly established in the recent discussion. Easily satisfies notablity, GNG if you likethe votes! are supporting some contorted interplay of guidelines that concludes uncertain so delete. cygnis insignis 16:07, 6 March 2019 (UTC) [insert line break cygnis insignis 15:24, 7 March 2019 (UTC)]
 * "anyone who lost an election, no matter what other factors can be considered, is not allowed to have a wikipedia article" The essence of the delete arguments. cygnis insignis 08:19, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * That's not true at all and thanks for jamming your added comment into the original post after that had been replied to. The delete arguments here are that being a failed political candidate alone does not establish notability. There may be other factors that establish notability, but none have been demonstrated regarding the subject of this article. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:39, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I did not modify my post, I added and dated that instead of engaging with editors and talk page ghouls directly. Go chase yourself. cygnis insignis 14:04, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Adding it the way you did is no better than modifying the post directly. It's essentially the same and it's something that you should not do. I suggest you read WP:TPG and WP:REDACT. You've been editig here long enough to know that! -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 14:28, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I will regard this as accusation you would rather double down on than withdraw, anyone who has read your comments would not expect otherwise. I inserted a line break [only!] and it is quite clear there was a comment / sig / date / additional comment / sig / different date. I recognise that avoiding a personalised reply from you is overly optimistic. cygnis insignis 15:24, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * There is no evidence in the article that even comes close to demonstrating that he meets GNG and I can't find any evidence. You can't simply claim he meets GNG, you have to demonstrate that he does. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 17:04, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
 * The evidence is in the article (as is tradition), if someone happens to look before voting, the discussion that preceded this one contains a consensus to keep (in the midst of the anecdotes that remind me why I avoid contributing to discussions where I have a coi). cygnis insignis 03:03, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete WP:BIO is not met. The City of Melbourne is responsible only for the central business district of the city, so being a counsellor on it is not a particularly high profile role. There's a long standing consensus that standing unsuccessfully for election does not make a person notable, except in unusual circumstances which I don't think is the case here. Nick-D (talk) 02:39, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Not high-profile according to who? There's not a City of Melbourne councillor who doesn't get written up in The Age and the Herald Sun on a reasonably regular basis. This is what I mean when I talk about the huge gap between "actually existing sources" and "assumed sources by people with opinions about councillors". The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 02:43, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I would be open to changing my !vote if it was shown to me that he was a high profile councillor. Onetwothreeip (talk) 03:19, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * TDW - add a few of the things he achieved as a councillor to the article and request us to revisit our !votes. I'm not from Victoria, and had never heard of him. I've heard of a number of City of Adelaide councillors, but I'm not suggesting that Alex Antic deserves an article before he is elected to the Senate. Anne Moran is probably the City of Adelaide councillor most likely to meet WP:GNG just for being a councillor. --Scott Davis Talk 03:40, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Bianca hall, or her editor, decided to a publish an article in The Age several days ((21 February 2019)) before the discussion of this article was reopened, this establishes his notability and is a notable coincidence. cygnis insignis 03:58, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Did you mean this article? It looks like bog standard election stuff to me and is mainly about a lot of other party stuff than just the subject?  Aoziwe (talk) 04:53, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Did you make your mind up before or after reading the article. Risstrom is the subject, and the party stuff relates to him directly, I never claimed it was interesting. cygnis insignis 08:30, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Actually, afterwards. I read through it three times to see what I was missing.  I was expecting and hoping for more.  Maybe I am just jaded by the vast majority of our politicians and political parties....  Aoziwe (talk) 09:38, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Seriously, good for you, I was being a shit. You usually make good comments. I'm jaded by comments that just seem to create more discussion for its own sake, it is like an online game where the rules are in-house and unrelated to what we do here. [forgot to sign] cygnis insignis 15:27, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per Frickeg. Candidates who have lost an election are not seen as meeting WP:GNG and local municipal officials are generally expected to receive national or international profiles in independent sources. --Enos733 (talk) 05:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep per the original AfD. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:33, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
 * The original AfD was a complete nonsense with an atypical background. The proposer was unhappy that a similar article was deleted, and nominated this article purely on the basis that the other article was deleted. The responses were simply calling the nomination as baseless, which it was. Onetwothreeip (talk) 12:36, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
 * There was some especially good comments in that AfD, prescient I think, As you say, "calling the nomination as baseless, which it was". Even more so now, as I read it, cygnis insignis 13:24, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Tymon. r   Do you have any questions?  20:20, 10 March 2019 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Delete,Does not meet WP:GNG as candidate lost the elections. Alex-h (talk) 21:31, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, EggRoll97 (talk) 05:48, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete I won’t bother to read this long ass AfD, so from the actual article itself, I see no evidence of notability standards at this time. Trillfendi (talk) 21:11, 18 March 2019 (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.