Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Christian Democratic Appeal candidates for the Dutch general election, 2012


 * 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. Mark Arsten (talk) 14:23, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

List of Christian Democratic Appeal candidates for the Dutch general election, 2012

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List of candidates of one political party for the recent Dutch elections, see WP:NOTADIRECTORY. Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:22, 20 September 2012 (UTC)


 * keep - The list gives information about the candidates, e.g. are they already an MP, is there mayby already an article about a candidate (a candidate may be a lijstduwer) and - after the election - who has been chosen (it is an open list) and how many votes they've got. Wikix (talk) 09:26, 20 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment The list also consists of a large number of redlinks, that are bound to stay redlinks (people that have not been MPs and have not been elected this time either, hence do not meet WP:POLITICIAN). The list hardly contains any information, it's just a list of names. 21 parties participated in the 2012 elections, do you propose to create this kind of uninformative lists for all of them? And then for all previous elections, too? If anything interesting can be said about these lists of candidates (like fights about rank order, scandals, whatever), then that could be said in the article on the political party itself (which in the present case could use a fair amount of cleanup, too). There is not even a reference for this list: the "references" given are an inappropriate reference to another Wikipedia article (WP cannot be a reference for itself, that's the snake biting its tail) and a note about the party leader. In short, this list is hopelessly unencyclopedic. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:17, 20 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Netherlands-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 21:09, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 21:09, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 21:09, 21 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep. I have seen WP:NOTADIRECTORY, as requested by the nominator, and can see nothing there that remotely relates to this article. Surely any encyclopedic coverage of political history should include such information? Or are we twisting the meaning of "encyclopedic" to be the opposite of its standard meaning? Phil Bridger (talk) 22:29, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment Even disregarding NOTADIRECTORY, there is not a single independent source for this list, so we even run into WP:V problems. Perhaps some government site or the party site displays this list at the moment, but that info will certainly be ephemeral and for previous elections will almost certainly be unavailable. As for political history, all of these candidate lists in the Netherlands contain many more names than the number of seats that a party can realistically win. I fail to see why the names of these unelectable people (who'll never meet WP:POLITICIAN and therefore most of them will never get an article) add anything to the political history of the Netherlands. Encyclopedic information on political history concerns what some people did and should be added to the appropriate articles. A bare list of mostly non-notable names does not add anything, though. In addition, elections in the Netherlands often have as many as 20 parties participating. Are we going to try to add candidate lists for all these parties for all previous elections? If not, which ones will we include and which ones not? I think we shouldn't include any and only include verifiable and notable information in the articles on the elections and/or the political parties concerned themselves. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:41, 22 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment Judging by comparable British elections, I would rather expect to find the official full candidate lists for all parties, not just for this election but for at least three or four past elections, on some government site, and probably on several others as well (for instance, the full candidate lists for all parties in all the British constituencies for the 1999 European Elections are still available). I would also note that, here on English Wikipedia, we do at least often include the full party lists for British elections where parties run lists, though we usually do it in tables within an article on the election or constituency (see, for instance, London (European Parliament constituency) and London Assembly election, 2000. And if we want to get full lists for not just the recent Dutch general election but the previous three as well, they are all available on Dutch Wikipedia (according to the main Dutch Wikipedia article on the general election, sourced from here if I've interpreted things correctly - but I'll admit I couldn't get it to work). PWilkinson (talk) 20:09, 23 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Problem is, although you will certainly find sources on some (but certainly not all) people that are on this list, there are no independent, secondary sources (the ones you mention, government and party, are primary) that discuss this list as a group, as required by WP:LISTN. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:35, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
 * That's one way a list can satisfy notability; it is not the only way. postdlf (talk) 01:14, 27 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, — Mr. Stradivarius  (have a chat) 08:37, 28 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep. I find the nominator's comments confusing, because there's no way that we absolutely require a list to be discussed as a list in order to qualify.  Have you found any source for the entire contents of pages such as List of Albanians or List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people, both of which are used by policy as examples of permissible lists?  This topic is clearly something that will get coverage down the line (in fact, I'd expect something like this to get more coverage in stable print sources than in the media), because political historians pay attention to major political parties and their candidates for national office.  In the mean time, this topic isn't by itself a problem: membership is clearly defined, it's not an NPOV problem, and many of the items on it are likely to have articles.  Nyttend (talk) 03:10, 29 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm confused, too. On what do you base your assertion that this list "is clearly something that will get coverage down the line"? One elections are over, nobody pays any attention to these lists any more. And many of the people on these lists are not and will never be independently notable: if you study this document, you'll see that some candidates from even the largest parties got no more than a couple of hundred votes nationwide, some as few as 118 (for some of the lesser parties, figures go down to 2 votes nationwide). Political historians will pay attention to the important players on these lists, not those who only get a handful of votes. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:00, 4 October 2012 (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.