Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gord Steeves


 * 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. Kurykh (talk) 19:31, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

Gord Steeves

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Delete. WP:BLP of a person notable only as a city councillor, in a city not internationally prominent enough to hand its city councillors an WP:NPOL pass, and as a non-winning candidate for higher office. While consensus formerly accepted Winnipeg as a city that got its councillors into Wikipedia on the grounds that it was listed in the article on global city, that's more recently been deprecated because it was listed only in the "sufficiency" class of quasi-global cities and not as a true alpha, beta or gamma class world city. But what we have for sourcing here is not enough to get him over WP:GNG in lieu -- this is based entirely on either primary sources or routine coverage of the election results themselves, with no evidence of reliable source coverage about him. That's not the kind of sourcing it takes to demonstrate a city councillor as more notable than the norm, which is the standard that Winnipeg's city councillors now have to meet. Bearcat (talk) 20:10, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 20:11, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Manitoba-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 20:11, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Strong Keep This politician has a colorful history and one that is of interest to readers familiar with Winnipeg politics and others, like myself, who just like reading interesting entries. In terms of Wikipedia guidelines, he clearly satisfies GNG. Now it seems that editors who frequent these pages have developed a "consensus" about certain cities as being not notable enough for inclusion. I wonder how many editors were involved as I know I am astonished that this could be determined with any degree of impartiality. I hope that common sense will prevail and wholesale deletion of notable entries merely because of a city's population size will stop. Bangabandhu (talk) 23:51, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Delete city councilors in a city of this size are not default notable.John Pack Lambert (talk) 14:11, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
 * The fact that his wife said something stupid on social media once is neither a notability claim in and of itself, nor substantively enough about him to clear the "notable because media coverage of him exists" bar — the article is not about Gord, but about Lorrie. Bearcat (talk) 22:50, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Except he's not only notable because of his wife. That's just one of many points that could be added to make this a rich, meaningful entry. He's run for mayor, among other things. I fear that on the one hand, editors are wary of allowing notability on one event, but at the same time, they're wary of notability based on a multitude of many, small events. So the only qualification for notability becomes when there is a presumption of notability for someone's position. Which is really unfair to all these folks from Winnipeg.Bangabandhu (talk) 16:56, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Running for mayor doesn't assist his notability at all — a politician's notability is measured against WP:NPOL by the levels of office they have or haven't held, not by the levels of office they ran for and lost. Running for mayor and losing does not make a city councillor any more notable than he would be if he hadn't run for mayor at all — it only boosts his notability if he wins the election and thereby holds the mayoralty.
 * And when it comes to local politicians of purely local notability, our job is not to be "fair" to the locals — it's to be encyclopedic. Canada alone has about 4,500 municipalities with local municipal councils, each of which has anywhere from 5 to 45 members depending on the city, resulting in tens of thousands of articles about municipal councillors for Canada alone if "exists as a municipal councillor" were all it took to get someone into Wikipedia. Multiply that by 180 other countries in the world, many of which are up to ten times larger than Canada and have up to 50 or 60 thousand municipalities with local councils, and that's simply unsustainable — which is one of the reasons why our notability rules are designed to exclude most municipal councillors unless they can be properly demonstrated as significantly more notable than the norm.
 * In an encyclopedia that anybody can edit, our articles frequently get misused as either public relations hagiographies by the subjects themselves and/or their fans, or as magnets for attack editing and criticism by their opponents — and our quality control model, of relying on the oversight of other editors to prevent those things from happening and/or remove them from the article when they do, works well on high-profile topics but falls flat on its ass very quickly the narrower a person's sphere of notability gets. An inappropriate edit to Donald Trump or Justin Trudeau or Theresa May will get caught within minutes, because a lot of people are reading and watching and monitoring those articles — but an inappropriate edit to a city councillor's article can linger in the article for months because the article isn't generating enough traffic to get bad edits caught and dealt with. So that's why we have to exclude a lot of topics of purely "local to a single area" notability — not because we're dissing them, but because below a certain level of nationalized prominence we can't guarantee an adequate level of maintenance.
 * So the way to make a city councillor notable enough for a Wikipedia article is not to state that the people in that person's own city might be interested — for one thing, if Winnipeggers were that interested, then the article would already be in a much better state than it is, because they would have edited it into something more substantive and better sourced than this. Rather, the key to making a city councillor notable enough is to demonstrate a reason why readers beyond the city itself might be interested: not why would a Winnipegger care, but why should a Torontonian or a Bostonian or an Angeleno care. Why would a large number of people be interested in reading and editing and maintaining and quality-controlling it. Bearcat (talk) 15:21, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this, I'm just seeing it now and wish I'd seen it earlier. There are some good points in here. The most important one that hadn't occurred to me was how aggressively enforcing high standards of notability is needed to reduce the number of pages so that there's more eyes on existing pages to fight bad edits. I need to think about the implications of that some more. I really really don't like stuff that's unsourced, way more than I am bothered by stuff that might not be considered significant enough for inclusion, but didn't think about how they were interlinked. They're definitely related. But if we were concerned about the level of traffic to these pages - which is important - I think a better way to address that would be to increase the number of links between entries. I haven't seen the number of links to an article mentioned as a consideration once in these discussions; it seems like that ought to be an important point for whether an article stays or goes if we want to make sure there are enough eyes on it.
 * I know we've talked about the city size issue a lot but another consideration around that is that its really the number of people they're representing rather than anything to do with the municipality itself. In NYC there are thousands of people in official positions far, far less significant than these Canadian councilors. So if we need a shorthand way to gauge significance I think we can do much better than anything related to the city's ranking. Bangabandhu (talk) 04:18, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * One more point/question: Are all previous editors to an entry notified when its considered for AFD? It seems like that ought to be done as a matter of policy. They have work and time invested in this and are well suited to see if the article can be brought up to whatever standard we're applying. Bangabandhu (talk) 04:21, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Kurykh (talk) 01:14, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Delete -- a non-notable politician and unsuccessful candidate for higher offices. The sources are routine and election related. K.e.coffman (talk) 01:52, 21 February 2017 (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.