Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of senior civil servants in the Department for Work and Pensions


 * 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 delete. Tone 17:03, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

List of senior civil servants in the Department for Work and Pensions

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

WP:NOT concerns regarding this directory of "senior civil servants". power~enwiki ( π, ν ) 16:15, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 17:13, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United Kingdom-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 17:13, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Delete Majority of people in this are not notable anyway. Trillfendi (talk) 17:25, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I suspect that you have not actually checked all 66 people (eliminating duplicates by eye) on the list to see whether they are notable or not. We don't delete lists of people just because they do not have articles.  We de-link the names to remove temptation, and this article is in need of some significant attention in that regard as several people are linked multiple times.  16 out of the 66 have articles already.  Uncle G (talk) 18:26, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Fails NLIST, no independent sources discussing notability of any of this, a departmental annual report certainly isn't a basis for an encyclopedia article. Reywas92Talk 17:39, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * From the title, I was expecting an open-ended list. But it isn't.  It is not, as I feared, a list of every civil servant who worked there for a long period; it is a list of the executives.  It's not a very coherent one, which is indeed down to it apparently having been pieced together from accounting reports, rather than from some documentation of the history of the organizational structure here.  I had a quick look to see whether this organization's historical structure changes at executive level were documented somewhere; but did not turn up anything.  Uncle G (talk) 18:26, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Strong keep. As Uncle G points out above, this is not a random list of employees but a list of the executives in the largest British government department – the most senior civil servants in the department who sit on its top-level management board. So, to address the initial issue about the article failing WP:NOT, as far as I see it is exempted from that criteria for deletion: "Wikipedia articles are not:... 7. Simple listings without context information. Examples include, but are not limited to: listings of ... employees (except CEOs, supervisory directors and similar top functionaries)". Furthermore, this list serves a useful function for navigation between articles, provides a useful reference guide for both readers and editors, and condenses information into one manageable space rather than through the creation of stubs or very short articles for less notable executives. While not all of them are notable enough to have their own articles, many could be; working from the top down, the following are just a few who have entries in the UK version of Who's Who published by Oxford University Press: Phil Wynn Owen, Jeremy Moore, , Adam Sharples , Hounada Nouss (I count at least 14 more people with entries). I know that there was a lot of coverage of the CIOs and Universal Credit management in the news, and a good number of these people have received significant state honours for their work. So, yes: already a quarter of the links are blue, and many others very likely to be notable (there are duplicate links). Regardless, NLIST states that "The entirety of the list does not need to be documented in sources for notability" so the inclusion of some non-notable people is not a reason to delete. Of course, the subject itself – the management of the DWP in this case – has to be notable for it to be a standalone (per NLIST), but we can easily find books, reports, articles, etc discussing the DWP management structure and its officers: a large section of , , , , , , etc. In short, while it may need work, this list is notable and should not be deleted. —Noswall59 (talk) 21:59, 20 August 2019 (UTC).
 * Delete. Majority of non notable people and it's not particularly important to know who was in these positions. Practically all sources are primary and there is no independent secondary sources that verify the list and many of the BLPs as notable. Ajf773 (talk) 10:14, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
 * How much weight should be given to that when you place it immediately following a comment that purports to point to sources documenting the executive structure of the organization? Less weight than if you had looked at them, evaluated them, and given a detailed rebuttal, certainly.  Uncle G (talk) 11:37, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
 * , have you read my comment? I've given a range of secondary sources for the subject in my detailed !vote above. As I've also pointed out, most of the links point to articles which are probably notable (I think about 50% of the links are already blue or are to red-linked for people with entries in Who's Who – there may be others who are potentially notable as well). Just because an article doesn't exist doesn't mean its subject isn't notable. —Noswall59 (talk) 14:44, 21 August 2019 (UTC).

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, RL0919 (talk) 16:17, 27 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete - It's a sourced and well-organised list, yet these are probably the lowest-ranked members of government that we have a list on (if they count as such - I'd reckon in a well-functioning democracy this is probably the lowest level of authority that gets affected by the changing of the guard after elections), so I don't think we have a guideline/precedent that these are automatically notable (eg. they don't count under WP:NPOL). In addition to WP:NOTDIRECTORY, there's WP:LISTN: "One accepted reason why a list topic is considered notable is if it has been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources, per the above guidelines." (emphasis in source). I looked at the sources given above, as the sources in the article are primary and Who's Who, which. Discounting The Stationery Office as manifestly not independent, the other links don't seem to give WP:SIGCOV to the group. I'm not sure what I'd expect here, but these don't strike me as satisfying LISTN:
 * "Hunada Nouss leaves Department for Work and Pensions for private sector": routine coverage of staffing changes, no particular emphasis on DWP or executives qualifying for this list,
 * "Coming soon: the great universal credit deception": mentions one name from the last, Neil Couling,
 * "Department of Work and Pensions director's problem with women": expose about a single person on the list,
 * "Civil servants fail to answer key DWP deaths questions after meeting grieving parents": again only one person on the list addressing a temporal concern.
 * As for the Neville Harris book, will often be newspaper articles satisfying LISTN, e.g. comparing the last several ministers in their practices and effectiveness, but I'm not seeing this here, nor really expecting TBH. There should be no shortage of routine articles like the ones mentioned, where people from this list get SIGCOV for a temporal event, but that doesn't confer notability to the group itself. The group BTW seems to be fairly opaque, as organisations at this level are, going by the ??s and missing data for present appointments, which is another point slightly against its notability.  Daß &thinsp;  Wölf  04:43, 31 August 2019 (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.