Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Harry Allen (Gloucester, Ontario 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. The "keep" opinions do not address the sources (or the lack thereof).  Sandstein  06:36, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

Harry Allen (Gloucester, Ontario politician)

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Minimally sourced biography of a person notable only as mayor of a suburban municipality. As always, mayors are not automatically presumed notable just because they exist; the notability test for a mayor is the ability to write and source a substantial article about their political career, not just the ability to offer technical verification of his term in office. However, this says nothing substantive about him at all except that a bridge was named after him two decades after he left office -- but at least half of everybody who's ever been mayor of anywhere has had a piece of municipal infrastructure named after him or her, so this is not an instant notability freebie that exempts the article from having to be substantive and well-sourced either. But the only references shown here at all are the regional council's own self-published meeting minutes, which are not a notability-supporting source, and a single article in a neighbourhood hyperlocal, which is not enough coverage to get him over WP:GNG by itself if it's the only media source you can show. As always, no prejudice against recreation in the future if somebody can write something much more substantial and much better sourced than this, but nothing stated here is enough in and of itself to make a mayor notable. Bearcat (talk) 17:11, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 17:11, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 17:11, 20 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. Being mayor of Gloucester meant serving on Regional Council, which is the predecessor of today's Ottawa City Council, whose membership we've deemed to be notable. Also, Gloucester had/has a population of over 100,000 which is usually good enough for the mayor to be presumed notable. -- Earl Andrew - talk 17:22, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Firstly, serving on regional council confers no special status over any other municipal politician, and secondly, the idea that a city's population confers a magic "no sourcing required" notability freebie on its mayors was deprecated almost a full decade ago — regardless of whether a place has a population of five hundred, five thousand or five million, and regardless of whether its mayor served on the wider regional council or not, a mayor's notability always depends on the depth and volume of reliable source coverage that can be shown to support an article, and never on the raw population of the city itself. The only way this can be kept is if you put in the work to make it substantive and well-sourced enough to clear WP:NPOL #2, and no size of city ever exempts a mayor from having to meet that standard. Ottawa City Council was the pre-merger predecessor of Ottawa City Council, by the way, and the Regional Council was not. (And no, Ottawa isn't being treated differently from Toronto in this regard, either: even in Toronto, old metro councillors from the pre-merger suburbs of Etobicoke, Scarborough and the Yorks are regularly deleted if they can't be referenced well enough to clear NPOL #2 on the sourcing.) Bearcat (talk) 17:27, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Actually in the case of the city of Ottawa there is a strong case for the Regional Municipality being considered the predecessor of the new City of Ottawa. Before amalgamation, the regional councillors and chair came to be elected separately. The Region was responsible for transit, roads, sewage, water, garbage collection, social services, policing and arterial roads. In the act which created the new city of Ottawa, City of Ottawa Act, 1999, S.O. 1999, c. 14, Sched. E, the "old municipality" is defined as "The Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton" [listed first] and "each area municipality under the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton Act on December 31, 2000" [listed second]. --Big_iron (talk) 11:38, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I wasn't talking about people's differing legal interpretations of what they are or aren't under law; I was talking about how regional council works in relation to Wikipedia's notability standards for politicians. Suburban city, county or regional councillors are not retroactively massaged into "global city" councillors, or handed an automatic notability freebie, just because their suburb got amalgamated into the central city 10 or 20 or 50 years after the person themselves left office — they still have to clear NPOL based the title they held during their own time in office. Prior to amalgamation, the only people in Ottawa-Carleton who get the global city pass for city councillors are those who served on Ottawa City Council itself, and anybody who served only in the suburbs or on the regional council clears the bar only if they can do it on quality and depth of their sourcing. And again, that's the same way it works in Toronto and Montreal: municipal councillors from the former suburbs are not deemed automatically notable just because their suburb got amalgamated into Toronto or Montreal after they left office, and still have to clear the same "sourced well enough to be special" notability test as any other non-global city councillor whose municipality is still a suburb today. Bearcat (talk) 13:45, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete a mayor of a city of three million might be presumed notable (since that gets us 86 mayors worldwide, and we can probably get reasonable coverage on most of them). A mayor of a city of 100,000 who has a single hyperlocal article written about him is about as non-notable as they come.  Rockphed (talk) 17:37, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
 * A city of 100,000 is the same size of a federal electoral district in Canada, and MPs are definitely considered notable. So, 100,000 is definitely large enough to confer the same amount of sources for its mayor as a Member of Parliament.-- Earl Andrew - talk 00:06, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
 * The number of voters in a district isn't what makes MPs notable; the fact that they serve in a national legislature, and are thus notable to the whole country and not just to one geographic cluster of 100,000 voters, is what makes MPs notable. Cities aren't nations and their councils aren't national legislatures, which is why they're not handed "no sourcing required" freebies just because their population is technically comparable to that of a federal riding. Even MPs don't get "no sourcing required" freebies either — they're notable because they always have the required sources, not because being an MP exempts them from having to have any. Bearcat (talk) 03:25, 21 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete a local politician who plainly fails WP:GNG from the sources in the article. SportingFlyer  T · C  04:28, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Local media coverage isn't enough. I'm nominating two other Gloucester mayors: Mitch Owens (interim and lost the following election to Allen, so even less notable) and Claudette Cain. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:02, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Yikes. There are also a more numerous bunch of reeves, most of whom are equally unnotable. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:10, 21 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete Non-notable local politician. Lefcentreright  Talk   10:28, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep A well referenced article on the mayor of a sizeable town. - SimonP (talk) 16:24, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
 * "Well-referenced"? Two of the four footnotes are primary sources that aren't support for notability at all, the two that are real media are just about the naming of a bridge rather than anything relevant to whether Allen gets over NPOL or not, and two pieces of local media coverage is not enough to deem a suburban mayor as clearing NPOL. Bearcat (talk) 13:47, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete a non-notable local politician.John Pack Lambert (talk) 07:10, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep it bears restating here that GNG says Notability is based on the existence of suitable sources, not on the state of sourcing in an article so I take issue with the original nomination beginning with the first two words. Retrieving news sources before 2000 does present somewhat of a challenge because Google News does not provide reliable coverage. --Big_iron (talk) 11:22, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
 * We don't presume that the "existence of suitable sources" has been satisfied in the absence of hard evidence that the existence of suitable sources has been satisfied. If "retrieving news sources before 2000" is a problem, then that's precisely the issue — we do not keep inadequately sourced articles on NEXIST grounds just because people speculate about the possibility that the subject might have received more coverage than the article shows, we keep inadequately sourced articles on NEXIST grounds only if somebody finds better sources and shows the results of their effort (preferably by actually expanding and sourcing the article, but at least by showing the actual results of a search for sources in this discussion.) You are allowed to cite print-only sources if you can find them, but NEXIST only kicks in if such sources are actually found and shown — merely speculating about the possibility that sufficient reliable source coverage might exist, without putting any effort into actually proving that sufficient reliable source coverage does exist, does not change the equation at all. Bearcat (talk) 13:34, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Agreed that the hypothetical existence of sources is not sufficient for notability in the Wikipedia sense. However, my main point was that the nomination was based on minimal sourcing which contradicts the spirit of the standard, which even goes so far as to say "Thus, before proposing or nominating an article for deletion, or offering an opinion based on notability in a deletion discussion, editors are strongly encouraged to attempt to find sources for the subject in question and consider the possibility of existent sources if none can be found by a search." I don't think that anyone supporting deletion has met that standard. --Big_iron (talk) 16:50, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
 * WP:ATTP: "As well, be very careful about flinging around accusations of a nominator's or commenter's perceived failure to follow WP:BEFORE. Not everybody has access to the same research tools, so the fact that you were able to access a database that provided more coverage than somebody else found in other databases is not, in and of itself, proof that the other editor was negligent in their duties. If you can salvage the article, then just salvage it and don't attack other editors for not finding what you found." Bearcat (talk) 23:17, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
 * No attack or comment on anyone's abilities or diligence was intended. My comments were based on the content of the posts which appeared to be inconsistent with the approach expressed in the standard. --Big_iron (talk) 12:32, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Delete. Fails WP:SIGCOV and WP:GNG.4meter4 (talk) 01:58, 28 September 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.