Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Denis Law (politician)


 * 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. There is a general consensus that coverage is insufficient to ring the WP:N bell. Ad Orientem (talk) 03:13, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Denis Law (politician)

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Tagged for notability ever since it was created, over a year ago. As mayor of a city of about 100,000, WP:POLITICIAN says he is not inherently notable, but could be notable if he has received significant press coverage. The footnote elaborates, "A politician who has received 'significant press coverage' has been written about, in depth, independently in multiple news feature articles, by journalists."

Searches of the usual Google types, Gale, HighBeam, JSTOR, Project MUSE, ProQuest and Questia turned up one solid piece in The Seattle Times, a re-election announcement in the local Renton Reporter,, a 250-word AP article announcing the sale of his publishing business, and routine coverage of the "said the mayor" and "was in attendance" variety. Unless better sources can be found, I don't believe this clears the bar of notability. Worldbruce (talk) 02:20, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Worldbruce (talk) 02:20, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Washington-related deletion discussions. Worldbruce (talk) 02:21, 20 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Comment I made some edits to the article to add references and clean up the article. --Enos733 (talk) 15:26, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete nominator is right there's a couple okay sources, but the sourcing's really scarce. He doesn't have presumed notability because he's a mayor, even of a six-figure population city. A couple sources I thought would be okay (, which is actually already in the article) aren't significant. SportingFlyer  talk  15:29, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete per above. Very little coverage outside of brief mentions, and not inherently notable as a local official per WP:POLITICIAN. Not enough sourcing to establish notability. Tillerh11 (talk) 17:45, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete. Renton is certainly large enough that a genuinely substantial and well-referenced article about a mayor could be kept, but it is not large enough to hand all of its mayors an automatic free pass over WP:NPOL #2 just for existing. The amount of sourcing shown here is not enough to get him over the bar, however — it simply amounts to the expected and routine local coverage that every mayor of everywhere could always show, with the only source that looks even slightly out of the ordinary on the surface (because the citation is to the Associated Press rather than a specific newspaper in Renton's local media landscape) being one that just namechecks his existence in the process of being primarily about something else besides him. So it doesn't assist his notability at all, and none of the other sources are "out of the ordinary" enough. Bearcat (talk) 17:59, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I'd like to know what we should be expecting of coverage about an independently elected Mayor of a large suburban city (over 100,000). WP:POLOUTCOMES suggests that we expect more than name-check coverage of mayors cities of regional prominence (undefined, but previously considered to be greater than 50,000 [but that standard has been significantly degraded over the past couple of years]). In this case, as noted, the article contains a couple articles that go toward being significant coverage (about his life), and numerous articles that describe his record as Mayor (from the local weekly - the Renton Reporter). While we might tend to discount this local coverage as WP:ROUTINE the volume of coverage is significant, especially considering the size of the city and the subject's tenure. What we don't appear to have is any nationalization of coverage about the subject, or a second long-form profile. --Enos733 (talk) 18:59, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Generally, what's most important isn't necessarily the number of sources in and of itself or even how much they do or don't nationalize, but how much actual substance they enable us to say about the person beyond just technical verification that he holds the mayoralty. For example, Brian Bigger doesn't actually cite many more sources than this in its current form (nine to seven isn't that big a difference, although the fact that two of them are extralocal helps) — but even if more expansion is still needed there, the sources that have been chosen already support a much more substantive article with much more useful and relevant and encyclopedic detail than this one contains. Sources that nominally verify the fact that a mayor won the election simply don't do as much toward making a mayor notable as sources that are actually about him and his agenda and his successes and failures in the mayor's chair. Nationalizing sources certainly help, but they're not a mandatory condition — a mayor can clear NPOL #2 on purely local sources too, if there are enough of them present to support a genuinely detailed article that says much more substantial things about him than just "was elected and then reelected and then reelected again". For another example of a mayor who is well-sourced as notable despite her sourcing not going very non-local and her city not being much larger than Renton either, see also Nancy Diamond — again, the difference is that her sourcing is being used to support genuine substance about her political agenda as mayor, not just to verify and reverify that she existed as a mayor. Bearcat (talk) 20:03, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * To restate, to meet WP:NPOL, an article about a mayor of a city of regional prominence would need adequate sources (in total) that provides a framework to create an article to sufficiently describe the subject and/or their agenda/actions as mayor. Those sources may be purely local, but national sources help. --Enos733 (talk) 20:34, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Baiscally, yes. More than anything else, the real test for whether a mayor is notable enough isn't really the number of sources or their geographic range per se — those can be factors, but they neither make nor break the deal all by themselves (for example, a nationalized source can still just be a glancing namecheck of the mayor's existence in an article about something else, and having one full-on biography of the mayor published in book form can potentially count for more than ten newspaper articles.) The ultimate test is whether the sources support enough substance about the mayor to make the article worth bothering to read. Bearcat (talk) 20:50, 20 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete The article shows no sustained, indepth coverage of the type that can actually build a meaningful article. The fact that this guy was able to be reelected to office unopposed at one point I think says it all that this is just not an important executive office.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:48, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep I think that there is the sustained coverage of the subject in the Renton Reporter, chronicling the subject's career. Over the past week, I've been adding bits and pieces to the article, adding sources and details as appropriate. As Bearcat mentioned above, for a mayor of a city of regional prominence, the test is whether there is enough substance to write a complete article. There are (at least) ten search pages of articles about the subject, from his support of a bus rapid transit system in Renton to support the relocation of the Renton library (and a smaller list of articles describing Law's actions in the Seattle Times. The subject also regularly writes an op-ed for the Renton Reporter, and that material, while cannot be used for notability, assists with putting substance in the article. --Enos733 (talk) 02:38, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment I don't think the Renton Reporter articles show notability at all, as those are articles that you would expect to be written of any mayor in any town. SportingFlyer  talk  02:50, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
 * The difference is that that for cities of regional prominence, as Bearcat and I discussed above, the expectation is an ability to write a substantive article about the mayor, including his life and career. Under those circumstances, the volume of local, independent reporting is something that should be considered in evaluating the merits of the AfD. As I alluded to, there is also a decent amount of coverage of the mayor (and the mayor's actions in Renton) in the Seattle Times. And while some of the coverage is of the more routine nature, but included is also coverage of the mayor's state of the city addresses (which show priorities and accomplishments), and actions and issues that the city and the mayor were involved in. --Enos733 (talk) 03:25, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
 * The coverage being predominantly or exclusively "local" isn't the dealbreaker in and of itself — nationalized coverage helps a mayor's notability, certainly, but it's not a mandatory condition that all mayors have to have to qualify for articles at all. Even the Bill de Blasios and John Torys and Sadiq Khans and Eric Garcettis of the world still get the bulk of their coverage in the local media rather than national or international sources, because local media are whose job it is to cover the mayor pretty much daily instead of just once in a while when something especially huge happens. As I explained above, the make-or-break condition for a mayor isn't really the localness or non-localness of the sourcing per se, but the ability to cite enough of whatever coverage exists to write a genuinely substantive article that's actually useful and informative and worth taking the time to read, instead of just a boilerplate "John Smith is a mayor who exists, he used to run a hardware store, he has two kids, the end." The problem with most mayors of cities this size isn't that nationalizing sources are a base requirement that a mayor can never be notable at all without having — the problem is that editors often don't put in the effort to do anything more with the article than "he exists, here's one source which nominally demonstrates that he won the election and a couple of others in which his name gets mentioned in a tangential context that doesn't actually add any value to the article beyond reverifying that he's the mayor, the end". Local coverage can be enough for a mayor, as long as you actually use enough of it to create a substantive article about his political impact, rather than relying solely on election results and articles about him cutting the ribbon to officially open a dog park — the question of whether the sourcing is localized or nationalized carries more weight in some situations (e.g. small towns) than others (e.g. cities that are large enough to claim some degree of prominence in their own right), but isn't necessarily always as important as the question of whether it adds anything substantive to the article or not. Bearcat (talk) 17:05, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
 * , thanks for that. I'm not fully convinced that this has quite crossed the line into keepability yet, but you're definitely moving it in the right direction by starting to add some content about significant things he did in the position. I'm open to flipping to a keep if that can be expanded a bit more. Bearcat (talk) 17:37, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I found a few sources about his publishing career. I also found a dead link suggestive of a long-form profile in CityVision, the publication of the Association of Washington Cities. --Enos733 (talk) 17:46, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Journalism-related deletion discussions. Enos733 (talk) 17:30, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Yunshui 雲 水 09:38, 27 June 2018 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * 'Delete Renton may be bigger than the usual small city we see in these mayoral AFDs, but when all is said and done, it's a suburb/fringe of Seattle, and this fellow got the typical and local coverage of a term in which nothing really remarkable happened that would make him more generally notable. Mangoe (talk) 12:31, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment Wikipedia's notability criteria exists so we can write a whole article about a subject - WP:WHYN. I do not believe it is our job to determine whether the subject did something remarkable or not, nor should we consider geography as a reason to include or exclude a topic. I'm not sure why I'm so passionate about this article, but I feel if this article (in its current form nearly 500 words about different parts of his career [and more that could be added], and greater than a WP:stub) is deleted, then we must reconsider WP:NPOL and should rewrite WP:POLOUTCOMES as it relates to local elected officials (and even then, there we come back to the relationship between WP:NPOL and WP:GNG), as there are lots of local mayors (including those that Bearcat mentioned above) that would merit reconsideration under a new formulation. --Enos733 (talk) 18:30, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ad Orientem (talk) 04:04, 5 July 2018 (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.