Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kathryn Leigh McGuire


 * 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.  A  Train talk 08:03, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Kathryn Leigh McGuire

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Biography of a person notable only as the first transgender candidate to run for, but not win, city council in one specific city. This is not a notability claim that passes WP:NPOL -- a person needs to win election and thereby hold office, not just run and lose, to claim notability as a politician, and being the first member of an underrepresented minority group to run and not win does not constitute a free notability boost over everybody else who ran and didn't win either -- but the article is not referenced anywhere near well enough to get over WP:GNG in lieu: the citations here are exclusively to local media in her own city, not to any evidence of nationalized coverage, and the number of sources here simply falls within what could be routinely expected to exist for anybody running in a city council election. There's also a likely conflict of interest here, if you compare the creator's username to the name of the subject's son who wrote a theatrical play about her. There's simply not enough substance, or enough sourcing, here to deem her notable just for running for city council and losing. Bearcat (talk) 19:19, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sexuality and gender-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 19:25, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Texas-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 19:25, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 19:58, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 22:55, 8 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep She passes GNG. There is no policy against local coverage and she has had plenty over time. The coverage on McGuire is hardly routine. Whether we like it or not, an openly transgender person running for office or being prominent in Texas was noteworthy and she was therefore covered. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:56, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * There's no policy that local coverage is always deprecated in principle, in the sense that if a person passes a subject-specific inclusion guideline then we don't care how local or non-local the sourcing is. But there is a rule that if a person doesn't pass any subject-specific inclusion test, and instead you're going for "notable per WP:GNG just because media coverage exists", then purely local coverage isn't enough to get there unless perhaps you can show a lot more of it than this. If this volume of purely local coverage were enough to pass GNG, we would have to keep an article about every single person who ever ran and lost in every city council election in every city on earth, because such people are always the subject of every bit as much WP:ROUTINE local coverage as has actually been shown here. For that matter, if this volume of purely local coverage were enough to pass GNG, we would have to keep an article about my parents' neighbour who once got into the papers for finding a pig in her yard. Bearcat (talk) 23:35, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

I’m the author of the article and Kathryn’s son so I hope I can clarify a few issues.

As for conflict of interest, the reason stated by Wikipedia for not writing about family members is that this could create a biased article. I agree with this. Wikipedia has extensive articles about autobiographies, but I only found suggestions about writing for family members, friends and foes. So I found an outside source, a blog called, “A Gender Variance of Who’s Who” https://zagria.blogspot.ae/2012/02/#.WdzPQYXTQqa and simply re-worded the person’s, Zagria’s, article about my father from this source. Indeed, this is where I got the idea to do a Wikipedia article in the first place. “A Gender Variance of Who’s Who” is in creative commons and its author allows the public to cut and paste portions of the work. Would it be simply easier to use the article from this blog?

When Kathryn McGuire ran for public office as an open transvestite, the coverage wasn’t “standard” at all. Kathryn was already a prominent socialite and this garnered national coverage. Kathryn was featured in at least two national television shows, A Current Affair and Inside Edition. National tabloids also featured Kathryn in the election and not the other candidates. I have hard copies of these, but I can’t find access to them on the web. Remember, this was a time before the Internet. I do think (maybe it’s my bias) that the person of any minority group who was the first to run is significant. Are you seriously telling me that you wouldn’t want to know who the first African American to run for political office was? Thank you everyone for posting! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jamesdirect (talk • contribs) 15:40, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Sure, we might very well want to know who the first African American (or the first woman, or the first LGBT person) to run for political office in overall US history was, if and only if they'd been the subject of enough reliable source coverage to pass GNG for the fact (a condition which is necessary because we have gotten tripped up in the past by single-sourced claims of firstness that turned out to be wrong once somebody dug harder than the original source had done). But there's no reason why we would want or need to maintain thousands of individual articles about every individual person who was merely the first African American person (or the first woman, or the first LGBT person) to run for but not win a city council seat in their own particular city. And Wikipedia does not have a requirement that our sources be web-accessible — as long as the citations are present in the article and not just claimed to exist without being shown, we are allowed to cite print-only sources, such as books or archived newspaper coverage. But what we're not allowed to do is to confer notability because of tabloid coverage — A Current Affair and Inside Edition were tabloid shows, not reliable or notability-assisting news programs. Bearcat (talk) 17:02, 10 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Weak Keep WP:NPOL obviously doesn't apply here. WP:GNG looks to be met. power~enwiki ( π,  ν ) 15:56, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * How is GNG met here? Bearcat (talk) 17:02, 10 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Delete a few passing references to a candidate for public office are not enough to show notability.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:51, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep: Individual has adequate coverage to pass GNG.  Houston is a major metro area and to run as transgender was truly groundbreaking. Adequate sources, though article can always be improved and expanded.  Montanabw (talk) 06:31, 16 October 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.