Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James L. Bentley


 * 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   no consensus. There are two issues here. The first concerns a possible copyvio. The user in question did not initiate the article (indeed the initiator in 2006 remains a user in good standing who last edited in 2021), but there was a contribution from a user who was banned for frequent copyvios, the diffs of which are summarized here. It has not been established that those edits were copyios, but in any case the current version of the article does not incorporate that material.

The second issue is one of notability. The original nomination and "delete" comments describe Bentley as an unsuccessful candidate, but it has been pointed out that he was elected to statewide office as comptroller general and with the article reasonably sourced the argument that he passes WP:NPOL and WP:GNG has merit.

As such, I cannot read a consensus to read based on notability, nor do I find that the copyvio issue brought up by Bearcat has been sufficiently substantiated. Sjakkalle (Check!)  11:02, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

James L. Bentley

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Page seems to be created by someone who is no longer active or was banned on Wikipedia. This seems to be about an individual who ran for office but did not succeed. This doesn't seem to pass Wikipedia's test for notability. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wozal (talk • contribs) 15:37 July 12, 2022 (UTC)


 * Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Articles for deletion/Log/2022 July 15.  —cyberbot I   Talk to my owner :Online 05:19, 15 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Comment This discussion page was created without the afd2 template. Fixed now—I have no opinion on the article at this time.   For future AfD nominations, please more fully follow the instructions at WP:AFDHOWTO.  Thanks.  --Finngall talk  06:11, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Politicians and Georgia (U.S. state). Shellwood (talk) 10:35, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete Article tagged for notability back in 2013 and no closer to notability today, Bentley throws up very little beyond routine procedural reports. The most impressive profile of him was in a self published memoir, which doesn't really help towards WP:GNG, which he fails. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 10:37, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep: Comptroller general (i.e. state auditor) is an office that confers WP:NPOL as an elected statewide position. Newspapers.com has a lot of sources on him as well, such as (referred to as both James and Jimmy). Curbon7 (talk) 12:22, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm not big into US politics, but I understand that Comptroller is an elected 'state-wide' position in the minority of states and Georgia ain't one of 'em. Which would make our man a civil servant, not an elected officer and therefore would fail WP:NPOL. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 12:45, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * , While the Georgia comptroller is no longer an elected position, it was when Bentley held the office in the '60s (I can't find an exact year when it stopped being elected, but it seems to have been around at least the late '80s). . Curbon7 (talk) 13:28, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep per Curbon7. He passes WP:NPOL by having served as an elected statewide officeholder (as pointed out above, the office was a statewide position at the time Bentley held it, even if it is no longer is). Sal2100 (talk) 16:44, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete, without prejudice against recreating a new article from scratch. I can accept that the position was an elected statewide one which would thus pass WP:NPOL #1 — but a big part of the problem with Billy Hathorn was that his contributions very, very regularly violated copyright by copy-pasting large chunks of text directly from some other source without proper attribution or rephrasing. So if somebody wants to restart a new article, that's fine, but any article Billy Hathorn was involved in creating or editing needs to be blown up and started over from scratch. Bearcat (talk) 20:58, 18 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I think this is a bit of an overreaction; basically not a single word of Bill Hathorn's sole major contribution still stands. The copyvio check isn't great, but isn't too terrible (and this portion of content wasn't even added by him). Curbon7 (talk) 23:57, 18 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The copyvio detector can only check against online sources. It can't check against the print-only sources that Billy Hathorn actually tended to copyvio from, which is precisely why it took so long to identify that he was actually doing it. Bearcat (talk) 02:35, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.