Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James Atebe


 * 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 Keep. Michig (talk) 06:27, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

James Atebe

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

WP:BLP of a smalltown (pop. 36K) mayor, who does not pass WP:NPOL on that basis and does not cite nearly enough reliable sourcing to get over WP:GNG instead — one of the two sources literally only reveals that he's a former roommate of Stephen Harper, but "former roommate of a Prime Minister" isn't a valid notability claim under any of our inclusion rules either. He might potentially qualify for a much better written and better sourced article than this, but as written and sourced it's not enough to get him over the bar. Delete. Bearcat (talk) 01:49, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 01:53, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of British Columbia-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 01:53, 18 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Soft oppose I'm from that "small town" which is a major centre in the Lower Mainland (36k is very large in British Columbia though within the Lower Mainland Mission is relatively small); because it's just outside the GVRD its town politics don't figure in the big-city newspapers so much; would being the first (I think) black mayor in British Columbia partly suffice for notability.  I agree the incidental-ness of being SH's roommate isn't noteworthy (other than in passing, so was Ralph Nenshi) by itself, but had you tried looking at regional papers (e.g. the Mission Record which was in my time the Fraser Valley Record and the Abbotsford papers) or are "smalltown papers" excluded as sources?  Atebe was an important figure in Mission during his tenure...and I have to confess not-quite-COI as I've met him personally, he asked to speak at my mother's funeral in 2011 due to her long service to the community in a host of capacities. I'll look over NPOL, but it sounds like as with shopping malls that quantitative barriers based on urban biases has seen the bar set high (and the "logic" behind that bias saw PRIMARYTOPIC RMs for Atlin, Bella Coola and Bella Bella pushed aside because of their tiny populations (despite their being the principle centres in their regions).  I'll see what I can find about Atebe; I'm rather surprised to see this AfD and think it's a bit premature....had you made any effort to look for more on his role as Mayor of Mission?Skookum1 (talk) 02:05, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I just had a cursory look around.... I admit that if someone has led a scandal-free government there won't be any "news" items on him....the "first black mayor" thing of course can just be in Mission, British Columbia or "firsts". A reeve of the former per-amalgamation District was the longest-serving (and I think) female reeve in BC, Ethel Ogle. I've known a few mayors of Mission, and I suppose none of them would pass WP:N on the city-size basis alone though; one of them was a failed MLA/MP nominee for the Tories but that's also not notable since he didn't win (John Agnew).Skookum1 (talk) 02:23, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Community weeklies don't count for much in the reliable sourcing department, no. It's not that they're less trustworthy in principle, but they're not distributed widely enough to count as evidence that a person belongs in an encyclopedia with an international audience. The Mission City Record would be perfectly acceptable for additional confirmation of facts after you added enough sourcing of the Vancouver Sun/Province/Times-Colonist vintage to actually cover off his basic notability, but since its coverage focus is exclusively localized it cannot contribute to the process of making him notable enough for inclusion. And the article, as written, is not claiming that he was the first-ever black mayor in British Columbia, either — if you can properly source that fact as being true, I'd be happy to withdraw this, but just asserting it without a source doesn't make him keepable.
 * And all mayors are always important figures in their own municipalities — just go ahead and try to find me one mayor anywhere on the planet about whom you couldn't say that "they were an important figure in [the town they were mayor of] during their tenure". So just asserting that he was locally important doesn't count for much either — if the city isn't large enough to put its mayors on the "automatically notable" list, then the mayor's notability depends on piling on enough sourcing to get them over WP:GNG as an individual.
 * At any rate, I did do more than enough WP:BEFORE to know that there's not a particularly great volume of appropriate sourcing out there about him in the databases that are available to me — if you have access to source repositories that I don't have which cover him better, then by all means feel free to WP:HEY it up. But the article's got to be made better than this before he can become keepable. Bearcat (talk) 02:26, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I just had a quick glance at who's in Category:Mayors of places in British Columbia and while I recognize some names as being notable in other regards, e.g. Randy Hawes or Frank Oberle, Sr. and Bill Hartley) as MLAs/MPs there's even some that are mayors-elect....again, I'll see what I can find out about, I'm nowhere near Mission right now as you know....Skookum1 (talk) 02:42, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I just did a spin through the category earlier this evening myself. I left people alone if they were also MLAs or MPs, or if they were mayors of large enough cities to pass NPOL just for being mayors — but trust me that I didn't put Atebe up in isolation. In fact, I've initiated a good half dozen other AFDs out of the same category in the last two hours — and all of the new mayors-elect were already nominated for deletion by somebody else earlier (though some of them might survive with suitable improvement, others almost certainly won't). Bearcat (talk) 02:50, 18 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep James Atebe was an elected mayor of a Canadian municipality for 6 years. He passes WP:POLITICIAN. --Leoboudv (talk) 03:27, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
 * While I agree, I don't see anything in WP:POLITICIAN that spells that out, though in the AFD results summary linked there I see "Each case is evaluated on its own individual merits. Mayors of cities of at least regional prominence have usually survived AFD," and I submit that Mission IS of regional prominence, both within the Lower Mainland and also provincially; the 32,000 figure cited by Bearcat seems arbitrary, Mission is the 6th largest district municipality in British Columbia and was the long-time commercial centre of the Fraser Valley (other than New West) until the opening of the freeway through Abbotsford and still is not un-prominent. Maybe from an Eastern Canadian perspective 36k is small but that's not the case in BC; Mission is quite large, and also historically notable.  I've written the Mission Record about the first-black-mayor thing; I recall there having been coverage in teh Vancouver Sun when he was elected, but that doesn't show up in googlenews or google at all - pointing to the problems of using googlesearch citations to prove anything around here; if teh media don't digitize their content it has the effect of "disappearing" it to google-obsessed eyes.  Pretty sure he was the first African (born in Africa) to be elected to high office in BC...unless there were white South African-born MLAs in the past.Skookum1 (talk) 04:57, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
 * The problem is that any municipality at all, even a town of just 50 people, could claim "regional prominence" if you define the "region" narrowly enough — in reality, for Canada the lowest level of "region" that's deemed to satisfy the criterion is "province/territory-wide". Even though it's not explicitly spelled out in WP:NPOL itself, the test that's normally applied at AFD — and this is a longstanding consensus, not some number I made up myself — is that in nearly all cases a municipality's population has to be in the 50K-100K range before its mayoralty becomes a legitimate claim of notability in its own right. Bearcat (talk) 20:42, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Leoboudv, WP:NPOL does not confer an automatic presumption of notability on all mayors just for being mayors. A municipality normally has to have a population of at least 50,000 before its mayors can be considered notable enough for inclusion on Wikipedia — below that, you have to make a strong and convincing case that the mayor or the municipality are special cases in some substantive way (for example, mayors of Charlottetown would qualify, because it's the capital of its entire province and thus has regional prominence extremely disproportionate to its population.) A mayor of a place the size of Mission could potentially still qualify for an article if you could powersource that article over WP:GNG — but it isn't large enough to render its mayors automatically keepable just for being mayors. Bearcat (talk) 20:42, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment Using google to argue for deleting an article of a local politician of Mission which is the 23rd largest municipality in BC does not pass logic in my view when he was elected as mayor both in 2005 and 2008 for two 3 year terms. Google would not archive each and every article on him and besides unless you are from Metro Vancouver, you may not even know that he was an elected black mayor in Metro Vancouver which is very rare for Canada. Isn't that wikipedia is for? I'm from Surrey, BC--the second largest municipality in Metro Vancouver--and have never been to Maple Ridge or Mission and yet I know James Atebe from the local news coverage. If he was just a local councillor at Mission then he clearly doesn't merit a Wikipedia article but he was a mayor there and he was elected two times by the people of Mission and the size of the municipality of Mission should not dictate whether wikipedia keeps this person's webpage. The question is whether was he prominent during his time and I would say yes--because he was one of the few black elected (and re-elected) mayors of BC, Canada. That is all I can say. Regards, --Leoboudv (talk) 10:31, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Everybody who was ever a mayor of any place at all was elected by somebody, and everybody who was ever a mayor of any place at all was locally prominent during their mayoralty. Both of those things are built right into the definition of what being a mayor is. But those facts do not, in and of themselves, make a mayor automatically notable enough for inclusion in an international encyclopedia just because he exists. Bearcat (talk) 23:34, 22 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia has an urban bias, as noted in my comments above about shopping centres and places in BC which weren't deemed "notable enough to be PRIMARYTOPIC" by haughty know-nothing admins abroad.....Mission is notable on the regional scale (the Lower Mainland) but it's hard to explain that to someone who lives in Toronto. I dispute the national/provincial limitation as valid given the sheer physical size of the provinces and the relevance of regions within provinces as "notablity zones" in their own right.  But Wikipedia is dominated by urbanites.....who count things in number/quantity, not meaning/quality.Skookum1 (talk) 10:39, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has an international audience. What we need to demonstrate is not "local notability" — if that were the standard, then we would have to keep every article about every person who was ever the mayor of any place at all. Every mayor of every town on earth was locally notable during his or her time as mayor — Atebe's "local notability" is not unique to him, but is a condition that all mayors of all places would always pass without exception. But that's not the standard that governs whether a mayor gets into Wikipedia or not — what gets a mayor into Wikipedia is evidence that they can make a reasonable claim to being a topic of broader interest beyond the purely local. Which means either the city passes Wikipedia's standards for determining what counts as "regional prominence" — which are not up for debate here — or the individual is sourced well enough to pass WP:GNG — which this isn't.
 * And as I've pointed out before, BC does not get to make up its own special set of BC-specific standards which are different from the standards that apply anywhere else. Wikipedia is optimized for an international readership, not a BC-specific one, so the standards that apply to BC-specific topics (including determining "primary topic" in a naming debate, determining how large a city has to be to pass the "regional prominence" criterion for the notability of a mayor, and on and so forth) place the needs of that international readership over local preferences. BC doesn't get to pick its own BC-specific minimum population figure for passing NPOL; it has to follow the same population figure that applies to Alberta and Manitoba and Ontario and Newfoundland and California and Nebraska and Maine and France and South Africa and Uruguay and Indonesia. And for that same reason, the fact that I happen to be based in Toronto has no bearing on this discussion — my understanding of British Columbia is not nearly as poor as you keep asserting that it is. Bearcat (talk) 23:34, 22 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I added 2 online sources from the Abbotsford Times and the Vancouver Sun. If Mission was a small unimportant place, why would the Vancouver Sun mention Atebe's loss in 2011? --Leoboudv (talk) 22:30, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Because Mission is inside the Vancouver Sun's normal coverage area, which means they're obligated to cover the results of its municipal election regardless of who is or isn't running in it. That isn't substantive coverage of Atebe because he's Atebe; it's WP:ROUTINE coverage of the election results, which would still have existed regardless of who the defeated mayor was or wasn't. Bearcat (talk) 23:34, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually, Bearcat, Mission and other valley towns are not in the Sun's "normal coverage area" and tends to get overlooked by the city papers; Abbotsford gets fairly regular coverage but not as much as communities in "Metro" (god I hate that term) get. Municipal election coverage is when Mission does get some coverage, but even when something is newsworthy it's not reported on by the big city papers unless it's a murder, car crash, or a profile of an individual or organization.  Regional myopia/bias is a local journalistic curse; and it operates within the city of Vancouver itself, also. and within the GVRD communities...news from New West barely gets noticed, for example, likewise Port Coquitlam and Maple Ridge, while West and North Van generally do, Burnaby not quite so much, Richmond very much...Maple Ridge similarly to Mission is not in the "normal coverage area" of the Sun though now part of "Metro".  Big difference between a paper's circulation/target market and its "normal coverage area".  The Sun is infamous for being Vancouver-centric and "West Side-centric" (except for its often-deep coverage of the Downtown Eastside).Skookum1 (talk) 02:42, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
 * And yet every round of BC municipal elections, without exception, always results in the Sun printing at least one "who got elected in Mission and Abbotsford" article. The claim I was responding to was that they singled Atebe out for special coverage because he was Atebe, which is clearly not the case — the same article would still have been written whether Atebe had won, lost or not been a candidate at all. Bearcat (talk) 03:55, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
 * That was pretty much my own point; that the Sun virtually only covers Mission re municipal outcome elections or when it's a "hinge" in the vote count in the two federal ridings now splitting it....they didn't even cover the Norrish Creek water controversy with Abbotsford which saw the latter withdraw from the FVRD, and though there's one item out there somewhere in their pages about the controversial Silverhill development (which Atebe supported, can't speak for the new mayor but he may be opposed to it), similar controversies within the Sun's "regular coverage area" e.g Coquitlam or Surrey would receive decent coverage. It's worth noting that in none of the items yet found it speaks to Canadian multiculturalism that not one of the reporters mentioned him being black, or first black mayor, or first African mayor or anything like that, rather they make a point of not mentioning it.Skookum1 (talk) 04:36, 23 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep Seems to meet GNG now. PS: Mission isn't a small town. Walter Görlitz (talk) 01:07, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It isn't a big enough city to grant its mayors a free WP:NPOL pass, either — unless it's a provincial, territorial or national capital, a city cannot grant its mayors notability under NPOL until its population is at least 50K (and even then, a mayor isn't necessarily guaranteed inclusion, but can still fall off the cliff if the sourcing is weak, until the city's a lot closer to 100K.) And five references doesn't satisfy GNG, either — that guideline isn't passed until the number of distinct sources is well into the double digits. Bearcat (talk) 03:43, 23 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment Those two sources help establish his WP:GNG as does this source When Atebe is given the same award as Adrienne Clarkson or Deepa Mehta, he certainly meets GNG. --Leoboudv (talk) 02:02, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
 * that certainly adds to his GNG but only one award or distinguishment so far, there may be a couple more out there yet though. No replies yet from the Mission Community Archives or Mission Record but will report here once I have any that may come.Skookum1 (talk) 02:45, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Notability is not inherited by simply happening to have been presented the same award as somebody else — that same award has also been presented to other people who don't have Wikipedia articles and aren't going to be eligible for them just because of that award itself, if they don't have other substantive claims of notability besides that. It certainly contributes to building his case for inclusion, I won't argue with that, but it doesn't slamdunk him all by itself. Bearcat (talk) 03:43, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep The article about the subject in the Kenyan Daily Nation would be "international press coverage." The wiki page for the Daily Nation states that the paper is the "most influential daily in Kenya" with a circulation of over 170,000. A keep is a common outcome for politicians who receive international press coverage. --Enos733 (talk) 05:18, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Randykitty (talk) 16:30, 28 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep Information presented in this article is verifiable and the multiple sources listed above meet GNG. Altamel (talk) 18:32, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Update I have received a reply from the Senior Archivist at the Mission Community Archives, they will see what they have and get back to me next week.Skookum1 (talk) 02:03, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep Saw his name and instantly know who he was (and I don't live in Mission) a very recognizable and sometimes controversial mayor of the second largest city in the Fraser Valley region. Legacypac (talk) 05:32, 29 November 2014 (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.