Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of American public officials convicted of crimes


 * 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. – Juliancolton  &#124; Talk 17:36, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

List of American public officials convicted of crimes

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I'd be in favor of a well-sourced article on this topic, although I don't think a list is the best way to do it (a chronological history focusing on events that have had a real impact on American political life would be best). This is not that article--virtually unsourced, ridiculously selective, treating misdemeanors as equivalent to serious felonies (thus a violation of WP:Undue weight in addition to WP:BLP), recentism, etc. If someone wants to try to save this, fine with me. But I don't see it as likely (and I don't think it can stand as it is, given the BLP problems). Chick Bowen 22:32, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep It could be improved upon and to me it seems better as a list.  Quistisffviii (talk) 14:40, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete I'm in favor of keeping a good topic where there is a potential for improvement, but... if you have a topic that people are likely to look at (government officials convicted of crimes), and all that the reader finds is a list with one source, then you don't want to put that on display. Wikipedia's reputation for reliability has improved since 2006, when this was put up.  The reason for that improvement is that the articles that came after the "The Simpsons era" are more likely to have links to verifiable sources for each assertion made.  If someone wants to take the time to improve the article-- so far, I don't see that anybody here intends to, myself included-- then by all means, hold off judgment.  When we make the statement that someone is a convicted criminal, we don't say "I'll prove it later."  And if the outcome is that this is going to be kept pending someone volunteering to improve it, the first such improvement should be a box that says "This article is an unsourced piece of garbage from the early days of Wikipedia, please disregard it." Mandsford (talk) 16:08, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep and change the inclusion criteria of that list to either crimes that had a political impact or serious crimes. Also, while I dislike that this article is incomplete, deleting it is not the way to go forward, in my view. The contents of the article is quite notable and could be verified. As for the BLP issue, I'll fix that myself right now. NuclearWarfare  ( Talk ) 22:00, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Update: The article no longer violates BLP. NuclearWarfare  ( Talk ) 22:10, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for adding sources. However, I'm still greatly concern about incompleteness and about standards.  The title is "public offical," which would probably include thousands of people, yet this group of nine is singled out.  That's a gross violation of WP:Undue weight. Chick Bowen 02:20, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep per Nuke's improvements. Mandsford (talk) 22:22, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - can be improved. Bearian (talk) 00:16, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - I just added to it, and there'll be more. -65.246.126.130 (talk) 18:58, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete, bad intersection of criteria for a list. Stifle (talk) 10:05, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete overly broad criteria. Dlabtot (talk) 00:11, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - Looks pretty well-sourced and specific. Cirt (talk) 16:31, 25 April 2009 (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.