Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Duane Nicol


 * 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. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 05:56, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Duane Nicol

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WP:BLP of a person notable only as the chief administrative officer of a city of just 9,000 people and as a non-winning electoral candidate. These are not claims of notability that get a person into Wikipedia per WP:NPOL, and the sourcing here is entirely to primary sources (like his own website and the city's website) which cannot get him over WP:GNG. I note as well that the article was created by a user named "City of Selkirk" (thus a direct conflict of interest), and that a different WP:SPA, probably still the subject himself, tried the exact same thing three years ago.

While formerly consensus favoured keeping non-winning candidates as redirects to lists of their party's candidates, in recent years that consensus has been weakening — in their current format such lists are no longer allowed to contain WP:BLP1E information about the candidate, but are instead limited to little more than a "name, rank and serial number" repetition. So many such redirects are now getting deleted (or just not even getting created in the first place anymore), because the target isn't allowed to contain enough substantive information about the person to make a redirect useful anymore (or because the redirect was actually sitting on top of a more notable person with a stronger claim to WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for their name than the candidate had). And in addition, even when this was a redirect there was a long slow-motion edit war over whether it should redirect to a candidate list or to Selkirk, Manitoba.

So I don't see much point in reverting it back to a redirect yet again — at this point, it should just be deleted outright. (And even if there is a consensus to keep it as a redirect instead, the repeated recreations suggest that we need the hammer of AFD to keep it that way.) Bearcat (talk) 23:20, 4 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 23:27, 4 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Manitoba-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 23:27, 4 February 2016 (UTC)


 * City of Selkirk Response:

I would like to start off by apologizing for any inconveniences I may have caused; this was my first attempt at creating a new article, and had planned to improve the articles content over time. The material I used was only meant to act as a foundation while I found newer/more relevant material to include. As my username would suggest, I am resident of the City of Selkirk, but I can assure you that the subject of the article had no knowledge of my endeavor to create this article. I was also unaware of any actions that took place in previous years regarding the subject of my article.

I can also assure you that my account was not created to act as a WP:SPA, but instead was created to correct erroneous information regarding the City in which I live. Such as our population size, which is actually over 9000 :)

If you have to delete the article as it currently stands, that's fine, but all I ask is that you don’t use the hammer of AFD, and instead give me another chance to provide an article that will meet all necessary criteria. — Preceding unsigned comment added by City of Selkirk (talk • contribs) 15:35, 5 February 2016 (UTC)
 * For the record, our population statistics on Wikipedia have to be sourced to official census data — as of the Canada 2011 Census, Selkirk had a population of 9,834, so we can't claim on here that it's larger than that until the Canada 2016 Census results tell us what new number to give. So that's not a thing to correct, as such. I'll grant that I rounded down to 9 instead of up to 10, but the difference between 9K and 10K is not the magic bullet for the notability of a local civil servant.
 * But at any rate, municipal CAOs or city managers are not necessarily a class of topic that are entitled to Wikipedia articles just because they exist. Such a person could potentially get an article if they could be sourced over WP:GNG, or have some other credible claim of notability besides being CAOs — but even the CAO of Toronto doesn't have an article, and I'm hard pressed to come up with any credible reason why we could possibly consider Duane Nicol to be more notable than Joe Pennachetti. Of the very few Canadian city managers who actually do have articles, every last one of them got it for some other reason — Alain Marcoux in Montreal was a provincial MNA in the 1970s, Penny Ballem in Vancouver was on the board of directors of the 2010 Winter Olympics — and none of them have articles because of the CAO role itself. When you get right down to it, being the CAO of a municipality is a role that largely flies under the media radar. Their existence might sometimes get namechecked in coverage of city hall — but if they're becoming the subject of media coverage that's substantive enough to count toward GNG, then almost by definition something has gone very wrong. (An actual article about Joe Pennachetti, for example, would have to depend far too heavily on coverage of Rob Ford's adventures in being Rob Ford, and not nearly enough on any actual coverage of anything Pennachetti did on his own apart from that crisis.)
 * And being a candidate in a federal election doesn't help a person's notability either — if a person didn't win the election, then they don't qualify for an article on the basis of having been a candidate. Rather, non-winning candidates can have Wikipedia articles only if you can properly demonstrate and source that they qualify for some other reason (such as having already held another notable office, or having preexisting notability as an actor or writer.) Bearcat (talk) 17:50, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Delete perhaps as questionably applicably notable. SwisterTwister   talk  02:25, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 02:17, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete as per Bearcat & because I searched, and I can't source it.E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:45, 11 February 2016 (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.