Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Martin Hill (councillor) (2nd nomination)


 * 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. I think that there is a somewhat broad consensus, borne out here, that local politicians need more than local media coverage for notability - and that's not been shown here.  Sandstein  07:55, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Martin Hill (councillor)
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Article passed an AfD way back in 2011, but fails WP:NPOL and WP:GNG. Tagged for notability for 8 months. Bondegezou (talk) 16:57, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bondegezou (talk) 16:57, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of England-related deletion discussions. Bondegezou (talk) 16:57, 30 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete county council level politicians are not notable by default and there is not enough sourcing to show notability.John Pack Lambert (talk) 02:56, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Local politician lacking notability. Consequently fails WP:GNG & WP:POLITICIAN. Lefcentreright  Talk  (plz ping) 15:06, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. County council is not a level of political office that confers an automatic notability freebie under WP:NPOL, the article is not referenced anywhere near well enough to make him markedly more special than most other county councillors, and the OBE is not a free exemption from having to pass regular notability and sourcing standards. Bearcat (talk) 03:56, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - local office, wherever it may be, is not normally notable, unless it is for a major city such as London, England. Bearian (talk) 01:45, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep, I'm surprised at so many confident 'delete' comments, which seem to be a misinterpretation of WP:NPOL. Hill has been the leader of a major local authority for an unusually long period and will have been regularly in the Lincolnshire media over that 14 year period. Added to that, he's been awarded a fairly senior OBE, so overall is not a run-of-the-mill politician. Sionk (talk) 02:37, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * WP:NPOL talks of "international, national, or sub-national (e.g., province- or state-wide) office" and head of an English local authority does not reach that threshold. Do you have an RS saying he has held the position for "an unusually long period"? Being a regular in Lincolnshire media would come under WP:ROUTINE. An OBE does not deliver automatic notability: vast numbers of people with OBEs never get Wikipedia articles. An OBE, as far as I know, is an OBE: what do you mean by a "fairly senior OBE"? Bondegezou (talk) 10:24, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Being the leader of a county council is not a free pass over NPOL #2 just because you presume that he probably received local media coverage — every municipal or county councillor everywhere has always received local media coverage, so if that were all it took to make a county councillor notable then there would never be any such thing as a non-notable county councillor anymore. At this level of office, the notability test is not the existence of local media coverage — it's the existence of nationalized media coverage, demonstrating a reason why he could be considered much more special than most other county councillors. Bearcat (talk) 16:17, 4 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. I think there is definitely a very sensible argument for the leader of a county council to be considered notable. Lincolnshire has more than a million people. The mayor of a city with that population would definitely be considered notable. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:15, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * WP:POLOUTCOMES says: "Each case is evaluated on its own individual merits. Mayors of cities of at least regional prominence have usually survived AFD". That's not quite "definitely considered notable". And he's not a mayor of a city: he's the council leader of a county. While one can draw an analogy, I am not convinced how strong it is. Council leader is a somewhat different role to a mayor: it's a less significant role than mayors in many countries are. It's a less significant role than a UK elected mayor. Ultimately, the question is can we write a meaningful article about this person, rather than just a bare minimum statement of his period in office? WP:POLOUTCOMES specifically also makes that point. Bondegezou (talk) 11:50, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. Firstly, you contend that it does not pass WP:NPOL, but it states that "Politicians ... who have held ... sub-national (e.g., province- or state-wide) office, or have been members of legislative bodies at those levels" are "presumed to be notable" and, in criteria two, "Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage" are also presumed notable. One could make a case that Hill is a provincial office-holder (when does "provincial" become distinct from "local" – it doesn't say; is there a distinction?) But even if not, the points made above point to the fact that he is the leader of a political organisation serving over a million people, is long-serving and has received a state honour for that service; I think this suggests a strong claim to notability. For the second points, about "significant press coverage", part of the problem with people like Hill is that the sources are harder to come by; a lot of the coverage he would have received in local press in the early 2000s and even in some of the 2010s is not online (or not easy to find) and the stuff prior to that will undoubtedly be offline – on microfiche in newspaper archives. There will be considerable amounts of material in local newspapers which could build up a case for meeting the GNG, but compiling that into an article in 2 days will be pretty much impossible. That's why these sorts of nominations are, IMO, actually damaging to the encyclopedia – far more so than Hill's article is. —Noswall59 (talk) 12:37, 4 December 2019 (UTC).
 * Also, a quick Google search reveals that there are a lot of news stories about him – not just routine stuff, but interviews, profiles, news stories. —Noswall59 (talk) 12:44, 4 December 2019 (UTC).
 * The article has been tagged as having a notability problem for 8 months. That tag states, "If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted." I think there's been sufficient warning. Bondegezou (talk) 14:11, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Perhaps, but then I didn't have the article watchlisted, so I was none the wiser. There is another way of looking at, though. If the person who had tagged the article eight months ago had instead tried to establish notability, do some research and improve the article, then they probably would have saved us all some time and staved off this AfD. But then it's much easier to stick a tag on something and hope someone else will do something about it. Cheers, —14:49, 4 December 2019 (UTC).
 * Counties are not provinces. "Provincial" is included in NPOL in the Canadian sense of the term, i.e. another word for what the US calls states, not in the generic "from out in the regions as opposed to the metropolitan centre" sense — and unfortunately, England simply does not have any level of government that fulfills the "state/province" part of NPOL #1. In the UK, NPOL #1 only covers Westminster, Holyrood, Stormont and the Welsh Senedd, not any level of government below those. And when it comes to establishing the notability of a county councillor under NPOL #2, simply digging out some evidence of local coverage in their county's local media is not sufficient — as I noted above, every county councillor everywhere can always show some evidence of local coverage in their county's local media. What NPOL #2 is looking for, when it comes to local councillors, is nationalized coverage demonstrating a reason why he could credibly be considered much more notable than the norm for that level of office. Bearcat (talk) 16:17, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Why is there any distinction between national and local media coverage? What policy is that distinction explicitly stated in? It sounds arbitrary to me and in contravention of the principles behind WP:GNG. —Noswall59 (talk) 16:38, 4 December 2019 (UTC).
 * Because NPOL would literally never apply to anybody at all anymore if the existence of some purely local media coverage was all you had to show to exempt a politician from actually having to pass it. Every county councillor in every county on earth can always show some local media coverage. Every mayor or city or town councillor in every city or town on earth can always show some local media coverage. Every unelected candidate in every election on earth can always show some local media coverage. So if some local media coverage were all you had to show to get a person into Wikipedia on the grounds that they had passed GNG and were therefore exempted from actually having to pass NPOL, then every politician on earth would always get that exemption and NPOL would literally never actually apply to anybody anymore. GNG does not just count the media hits and keep anybody who surpasses a certain arbitrary number — it does also take into account the depth of how substantively any given source is or isn't about him, and the geographic range of how widely he is getting covered, and the context of what he is getting covered for. Local media cover all kinds of local interest topics that aren't relevant to an international encyclopedia at all — local bands playing their local pub, winners of local poetry contests, high school athletes, owners of chip stands, librarians, school board trustees, and on and so forth. So the existence of some local media coverage does not automatically translate into a GNG pass that exempts a person from actually having to pass the defined notability standards for their field of endeavour — if the person doesn't have an "inherent" notability claim that guarantees a Wikipedia article, then their coverage does have to expand beyond the purely local before its existence is enough in and of itself to exempt them from having to pass the defined notability criteria that apply to their occupation. There are quite literally millions of people in the world who could show a handful of local coverage in exclusively local-interest contexts in their local media, and thus claim that they had passed GNG and were therefore exempted from having to actually accomplish anything that actually satisfied any of our SNGs — so if that were how it worked, we'd just be LinkedIn. Bearcat (talk) 17:35, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I seriously doubt every elected councillor has news coverage. My three local councillors hardly register on their own Twitter accounts, let alone the newspapers. I'm just worrying here that a simplistic 'local councillors are never notable' rule is being applied here, rather than giving credit to councillors that are well-above the ordinary. Sionk (talk) 22:22, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Exactly, I will reply properly to Bearcat's comment here and at Rob Parker's AfD tomorrow but Sionk is articulating my point. I've never said anywhere that we should allow anyone who happens to get mentioned in a local newspaper (or any newspaper) to be included. I'm suggesting that significant, sustained, non-trivial and non-routine coverage in local news shouldn't be considered differently than similar levels of coverage in national news. That way non-entity parish councillors would probably not meet the bar, but long-serving, top-tier local politicians like Hill and Parker would. I think this is a sensible way of dealing with this issue. —Noswall59 (talk) 00:12, 5 December 2019 (UTC).
 * If you're not seeing coverage of your three local councillors, that says more about news what you're choosing to pay attention to than it says about your councillors. Local media's job is to cover local politics — that's right at the very core of why local media even exists at all — so every local politician everywhere most certainly is always referenceable to some degree of local media coverage. Bearcat (talk) 01:20, 7 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete Fails WP:NPOL as a member of a county council must receive significant national or international coverage (well beyond that of the average county official). The expectation is that we should be able to write a substantial article about the subject, much more than "they exist and hold this office." I don't see any sourcing that indicates that this subject is more notable than other county officials. --Enos733 (talk) 00:29, 5 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment: I have expanded the article considerably by adding material about his early work in local politics – he was chairman of the council's finance committee and then the Police Authority's finance committee so was responsible for setting their budgets and funding allocations in the period 1997 to 2005; this garnered him a lot of attention in the local press and in the Local Government Chronicle, and also provided him quite a political platform. He was also involved in the Speechley scandal (contending his ailing leadership in 2002) and was touted in the press as a contender again in 2004, before taking over as a "moderniser" in 2005. In my sandbox, I'll continue to research and summarise his work as leader since 2005. —Noswall59 (talk) 14:51, 5 December 2019 (UTC).
 * That is a huge amount of valuable work. As with the Rob Parker article, I feel with much of the content, it would be better to put that into the Lincolnshire County Council article. That article could have a detailed political history using the content you've added here and at Rob Parker. I would thus like to officially change my stance to Merge to save all that content. But more than with the Rob Parker article, you have also found good content specifically on Mr Hill and those in the discussion above should re-review the article to see if they now feel differently. Bondegezou (talk) 17:14, 5 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Soft Delete. If we are accessing with WP:NPOL he doesn't pass notability in anyway because criterion 1 states that Politicians and judges who have held international, national, or sub-national (e.g., province- or state-wide) office, or have been members of legislative bodies at those levels. On the other hand it may appear asif he has enough coverage but doesn't so delete. Lapablo (talk) 14:09, 7 December 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.