Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John Bell (North Carolina 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 After discounting several comments with bad or no reasoning, I'm left with an equal number of delete and keep comments. Most of those didn't take into account the option to merge information. I would recommend merging this somewhere until such a time more than a single sentence can be written about him. As it stands the result is no consensus. - Mgm|(talk) 00:25, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

John Bell (North Carolina politician)

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

Nom, and opine for ... Del: The page was ProD'd on the basis
 * Mayor of "city" of 17K, no info but bare facts of ofc. If needed, should start from scratch with something more substantial.

but ProD was refused, arguing
 * 239 gnews hits for "John Bell " "elizabeth city"

That pathetic presence would persuade me of non-notability, if i could reproduce it. (Perhaps the colleague who asserted it will provide URL's that clarify the claim; going to http://news.google.com/nwshp?ned=us and pasting
 * "John Bell " "elizabeth city"

-- having clip-board-copied it from the image of the summary on the edit's diff page -- into the "Search and browse 4,500 news sources updated continuously" box, and clicking "Search News" gives me
 * Your search - "John Bell " "elizabeth city" - did not match any documents.

) In any case, my result from a vanilla G-search gives
 * Results 231 - 234 of 234 for "John Bell " OR "John H. Bell " "elizabeth city" -"North Carolina politician" -wikipedia.

Inspection of three samples -- the 1st 10, 111-120, and 223-end -- reveals
 * 1 - 10:
 * 3 for coverage by The Virginian-Pilot ("largest daily metro paper" in adjacent Va., and a good source) of 1999 election results, & 2001 filing;
 * 3 official postings of city or county business;
 * 2005 coverage, by supermarket chain, of him being the number-one attraction at one of its store openings;
 * "Today in History: Lincoln defeated ... John Breckinridge, John Bell and Stephen Douglas.";
 * list of John Bells at www.reunion.com, including Bell, Johnny, 32, Elizabeth City, NC (born 5 years after start of the mayor's first term)
 * Google-books hit on JB signing a deed ... in 1641.
 * (That is, 7 of the first 10 are about him, each the inevitable result of his doing what it was inevitable that someone would do. But you'll see that the first few are not representative of the 200 and some:)
 * 112 - 121 :
 * 2 Johns with Bell as middle name;
 * 8 real John Bells, on lists where their name is not juxtaposed with Eliz. City's, even tho they both occur; of them the one with the best hint that it could be his, is that he could be the 1952 grad of a college only 281 miles from where he is now mayor, who is noted for first contributing to his alma mater in his mid-70s, to the extent of several hundred dollars. Or not.
 * 223 - 234:
 * Essentially like the middle batch, except that two of these are Japanese sites that have the sort-key hits in the midst of sequences of words showing no syntactic structures longer than "free and clear".

In fact Google offers plenty of evidence of him being no more notable than any other small town mayor or first selectman: it's one thing to say that if the Nobel winner hadn't done xyz, there are hundreds of others who could have done that feat, by some equally interesting (but interestingly unique) route, before too long; this is quite another situation, where anyone among something like 5 or 10% of those 17K Eliz-citians would have done the essential thing he did, as long as none of the other 800 or 1500 of them stepped up, on the same schedule, and we have no sign of his having done anything more worthy of encyclopedic mention than each them would have done simply as a matter of course. I'm open to learning how much, that is more significant than what i found, someone else can pull out of the 200 unique hits that i didn't look at -- some small-city mayors are notable -- but i think the above is a good-faith attempt no less than what WP:notability intended, when it failed to hint an exhaustive search for evidence is needed. --Jerzy•t 05:54, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Well he could certainly be a VP candidate! Ok sorry, bad joke. I know I know, he hasn't been governor yet. This nomination is very long! I don't really know by what criteria we determine notability. Two good references? What about people who were notable before the web. People don't use off-line references very much here (which is probably a good thing as they'd be hard to check). Mayor of a city of 17,000 for that many years? It seems kind of notable.  How do we weigh it? Google hits? What he accomplished in office? Is there a harm in including this semi-notable guy? Inquiring minds want to know! I will watch for your informed reply. But if you don't convince me I may vote keep. You've been warned... ChildofMidnight (talk) 08:57, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep - Notability now established the usual way. No reason to make an exception to our usual practice here. Wily D  12:35, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete Our "usual practice" has not been to keep such articles, since they would result in encyclopedia articles for millions of people who have been local officials. This article is already cranking up succession boxes, indicating an intent to create articles for every mayor in the history of the town. There is no precedent of automatic notability for small town mayors. Being the mayor of a small town naturally creates a few proforma newspaper article: "Jones runs for mayor, Jones wins election, Jones dedicates new Little League park." A small town mayor being mentioned in the small town paper several times does not establish notability, any more than a college vocal group or intramural softball team being mentioned in the campus paper at a college of the same size. If 17,000 is a big enough town, then how about a town of 1,259 which also has a mayor and a newspaper and has items about the mayor regularly in the local newspaper? They also regularly mention the city councilmen. Should we have articles about each of them, with succession boxes? There should be a limit. The mayor of New York City? Sure. The mayor of Dogpatch? Nope. Edison (talk) 15:09, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete Local officials aren't notable unless notability is established for other reasons; and I don't really see how these sources prove his notability. By the way, why question EC as being a city?  There's almost nowhere in the USA where a municipality of 17,000 people isn't a city.  Nyttend (talk) 17:45, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Response to question: Perhaps i was making a subtle distinction: 17K is a town even if it has the legal status of a "city". (BTW, I was the first to use the term "small town", tho i'm not sure 17K is a small town. I am sure "Dogpatch" is serious hyperbole for "17K town/city", and i hope i did not encourage it.) The laws of municipal administration aside, towns (aside from "bedroom towns" near real towns) provide the resources that consumers are likely to need every week or perhaps unexpectedly on any given day, to those who live in them or nearby bedroom towns, and to any rural residents closer than the next town; cities provide resources that are uneconomical to provide, except in a market much larger than those of typical towns. I'm neither a demographer nor an economist, but my gut tells me that for 1st-world standards of living, cities start no lower than 50K or 100K, unless the surrounding area is unusually heavily settled. --Jerzy•t 06:55, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: In practice, we can't verify hope to verify city/town numbers without paying attention to the legal distinctions among municipalities. CT has about 200 municipalities, each a town, city, and/or borough. (One borough is also a town and has a population of 32K; the remaining 8, each part of a town, are 4K or under; i think we can ignore the boroughs.) There are 169 towns; two of them contain cities (not the reverse!), and each of 19 towns is in practice indistinguishable from a city with the same name and the same territory.  The cities range from 137K down to 7K; FWIW, each of the two smallest is part of a town: the town including the 7K city has 11K all told; the one with the 9K city has 42K.   The towns that neither are also cities, nor contain cities, range from 62K down to 751.   Three cities (15%) are 17K or smaller; 48 of the no-city towns (32%) are 18K or larger.   The median population of cities is 59 K; the median population of towns is 12K; the median population of no-city towns is 9K. --Jerzy•t 06:55, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep Here is the gnews (archives) search that gets 239 hits for him, which I thought seemed a good number for a small town mayor,  some articles specifically on him, like the one I added.  WP:POLITICIAN says "mayors are likely to meet this criterion" of being  "Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage" and he seems to qualify with this amount of coverage.John Z (talk) 19:44, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment WP:POLITICIAN says "Generally speaking, mayors are likely to meet this criterion, as are members of the main citywide government or council of a major metropolitan city." I think "major metropolitan city" is operative here with respect to mayors. Otherwise a town of 1200 with a newspaper will have about as many stories about their mayor as would this mayor of a town of 17000. Edison (talk) 23:59, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Well, the way it is written, "major metropolitan city" doesn't apply to "mayor." It seems to be saying that councillors of a big city would tend to have as much news about them as a mayor of a community of unspecified size.  Towns of 1200 will be much less likely to have newspapers and they will be less likely to provide a large amount of coverage to anyone. Why should we worry about city sizes, if amount of (google-indexed) news coverage is more in line with wikipedia criteria, and will naturally be roughly proportional to city size for a mayor or councillor?  In any case, 200+ gnews hits is a good number for anyone, and usually results in a keep. With articles specifically on him, this particular mayor seems to fit under the general notability criterion.  I was surprised by the amount of newspaper coverage on him, and I don't think we should second guess, by arbitrary size limits, why there would be substantial coverage on a particular person.John Z (talk) 01:12, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * That "Generally speaking..." quote is grossly out of context, which is why this has devolved into parsing the ambiguous relationship of the clauses. Please note that it demands context: it does not say that "mayors are notable" or "mayors are likely to be notable"; it says mayors are likely to be
 * Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage
 * which is valuable in determining notability only because it implies the value of more detailed examination once it is established someone is a mayor, whereas "councillors of" a town or small city are prima facie non-notable, and deletion is called for someone takes on the burden of making a further case against it. The earlier sentence that i just quoted also bears a footnote, saying in relevant part (emphasis is mine):
 * Generally, a person who is "part of the enduring historical record" will have been written about, in depth, independently in multiple history books on that field, by historians. A politician who has received "significant press coverage" has been written about, in depth, independently in multiple news feature articles, by journalists.
 * I think it should be clear that the portion i italicized demands information beyond what the mayor's office, clerk of elections, or town party committee emits in press releases or official records. And that nothing more than that has been exhibited here. --Jerzy•t 06:55, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: In light of the sampling of a "vanilla" Google search, i provided with my nom'n, why are you assuming these 239 apply to him? I don't have $700 to spend on seeing whether the hits say anything non-trivial, but i can see you've erroneously counted at least the 1862 one whose extract reads (my emphasis added)
 * ... S E Spaulding left on Saturday for Elizabeth City with the ners taken by ... ths Cumberland iron works of Wood Lewis Co John Bell owning one third of ... "
 * --Jerzy•t 06:55, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Of course there are a false positives in that gnews archives search. But as far as I can tell, the great majority are for this John Bell, 200+. (throwing in the word mayor doesn't change much)  Searching using "john h bell" elizabeth city mayor gets 147 gnews hits, but omits ones not using his MI. Again, I think this, about 200, is a high number for a small town former mayor.  This may be an artifact of google's selection, or of the logorrhea of the area's press. Compare results for  "David Jarrell" Asheboro, current mayor of a slightly larger city in NC - 89 gnews hits, or 204 for "David Combs" Rocky Mount, a city three times larger. I added to Further reading one retrospective article on him at his retirement that seems to go into more detail - gives his age 69 in 2005 and former profession (insurance executive.), Here's one quoting comments when he was out of office 1982-2000 ("We're planning ourselves to death,'" said John Bell, mayor of Elizabeth City from 1971 to 1981. ..And some things are put in the plans over and over again") This 1993 article reports he was under heavy pressure to run then - (see preview here).   I was of two minds to deprod until I saw that there was a surprisingly large amount of coverage (of course much of it incidental, but it adds up) and which goes beyond official press releases.  Of course it all seems to be from a few local papers, but there is no consensus I know of that nonlocal coverage is necessary.  There's clearly some room for expansion just from free previews, and  I personally do not understand any reason given for not having such an expanded article written according to our policies.John Z (talk) 01:24, 19 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Comment Unless someone adds something notable to the article my inclination would be delete. I think the article could demonstrate notability. But it doesn't.ChildofMidnight (talk) 00:22, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete We never have established a cutoff point for mayors. My guess is that it would normally be somewhere around 25,000 or 50,000. Obviously some would be notable below whatever point it was. I see no indications that he is. DGG (talk) 17:11, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete Not notable. ChildofMidnight (talk) 17:29, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Living people-related deletion discussions.   -- Raven1977 (talk) 01:10, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions.   -- Raven1977 (talk) 01:10, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep; as long as sources exist, I see no reason why we should not have articles on significant local politicians. Some might argue for the exclusion of politicians from particularly small towns, but even then I don't see how this would qualify, as a population of 17,000 makes it more like a medium-sized town. Everyking (talk) 05:09, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Mgm|(talk) 09:57, 18 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Obvious Merge to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. I'm all for civic pride, but let's be clear on this.  This article is apparently part of a project to make a biographical article for all persons who have ever served as mayor of a small town in North Carolina, and it operates on the assumption that there is an inherent notability for any person who has ever been the mayor of any town.  There are such presumptions for a limited number of politicians, such as persons who have served in a national legislature, or chief executives (like governors) for a state or province.  There is a presumption that any incorporated city, or any documented unincorporated community, anywhere in the world, is notable.  But one cannot assume that any executive of any incorporated city is entitled to his or her own article on Wikipedia.  It doesn't matter that this is all sourced; one would expect that there are sources that will prove that so-and-so was at one time the mayor of such-and-such place.  It doesn't matter whether there are hundreds or even thousands of municipalities in the U.S. that are larger than Elizabeth City.   What does matter is that there is no policy that says "all mayors of towns of more than _____ are irrebutably presumed to be notable".   Mandsford (talk) 14:11, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Oppose merge A section about a small town which listed each mayor in the town's history would give undue weight to the mayor position, and in many cases would be the longest section of the article. A list of mayors of a small town 150 years old would be about as long as the List of mayors of Chicago but chances are no mayor of the small town achieved any coverage outside the town. There are many small towns of 2000 residents or less which have a newspaper which publishes routine coverage of the Mayor and councilmen. They are only of local interest, and their limited historical importance dioes not justify listing them all in the article about the town or in standalone articles for each or even in a standalone list like the one for Chicago. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. This series of articles on local nonnotable politicians includes such articles as List of town council members of Chapel Hill, North Carolina which apparently aims to includes every identifiable person who every served on the town council since the settlement was founded in 1793.I don't know when the first town council met, but I expect some such group of Commissioners was elected pretty quickly. What is the point of this, with respect to having encyclopedic articles? Edison (talk) 20:12, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete You changed my mind, Edison. I think we both agree that we don't need individual articles about every mayor of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and on the larger matter that mayors of cities are not inherently notable.  You're right, saying "merge" weakens what should be a united front that mayors aren't entitled to their own articles and that they have to establish their notability.   I note that there are only two of these articles and there's so little content, a delete would accomplish the same purpose.  However, I would point out that if someone wants to add a list of mayors to the Elizabeth City article, that's their right; and it's someone else's right to take the list back out.  Either way, whatever someone wants to add or take away from the E.City page is no concern of mine.  It's fair to say that I have no intention of visiting Elizabeth City, nor its Wikipedia article. Mandsford (talk) 22:54, 18 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Comment: Can't this article be part of a list, "Mayors of Elizabeth City, North Carolina" or something like that? The list wouldn't need to be composed of just names and dates; each mayor could have one or two paragraphs, depending on the information available. Everyking (talk) 05:11, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
 * As a practical matter, I can say that the article Elizabeth City, North Carolina is beyond deletion, and that a debate would be swiftly closed based on the inherent notability policy. On the other hand, an article about a list of mayors of Elizabeth City would not be entitled to the same deference if it were nominated.  If I were wanting to put this information somewhere, I would put it in the "protected" article.  Mandsford (talk) 17:41, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
 * ("Protected" means something quite specific that does not apply to Elizabeth City, North Carolina.)  I agree that AfD on the town's article would fail, and i would be among those opposing it, as i would for the microscopic "town" (there i go again) of Success, New Hampshire. (It's really a lake with a stretch of  summer places on one shore and a handful on the other or scattered elsewhere, and a half or whole dozen head-scratcher intersections of logging roads and access trails for the Appalachian Trail.)  But in contrast to protection, the article's assured continuing existence does not interfere with prompt removal of non-notable information. If Mayor Bell's name were in the article as a lk, i would at least convert it to plain text; if it were in the article with only the information that is in this article, i'm guessing i'd be likely to move it out to the talk page with the suggestion that it would be more likely to be of value in the context of one well thot-thru 'graph abt him and/or a nearly up-to-date list of at least recent mayors.  I'm not so far finding persuasive the argument that a long list of mayors excessively weighs down an article on a town this size. Yes, articles can be read thru in sequential order. But IMO users who set their Prefs to suppress display of the ToC are making a bad mistake, and we should assume that they will make use of the ToC as a means of picking and choosing which secn or secns to actually read. (I restrain myself from enumerating the small tricks for using the ToC repeatedly to select sections without refreshing the window.) So i'd say that size ratio alone is insufficient to decide whether the less valuable info should be retained. In fact, i might defend removal of something small, bcz it makes the article look like it's been taken over for vanity purposes, but accept the same dull info as part of a block of equally dull info about other individuals. Or not. --Jerzy•t 23:54, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
 * CommentA small town mayor could be notable if he did something really good or really bad which achieved sustained national attention Even a dogcatcher could be notable if in his spare time he were the "BTK Killer." 99.9% or more of small town mayors, council members, and city employees do their mundane jobs and never rise to the level of encyclopedic notability, even if the local newspaper mentions they won election and went to council meetings. The town of 1200 I cited above has as much mention of their city officials in the local paper as does Elizabeth City for Bell, his predecessors and his successors, along with the council members. Smaller towns mention by name which of the three town policement arrested someone in weekly issues of the town paper. Every small town policeman, water department supervisor, fire chief and city clerk would have about as much justification for an article as Bell if only the number of newspaper mentions is used as criterion, ignoring that it is just proforma mentions in the local paper. Then we could have 100,000,000 articles about utterly unimportant local officials from all of recorded  history, throughout the world. Edison (talk) 00:06, 22 November 2008 (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.