Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mayors of Teaneck, New Jersey (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 keep. (non-admin closure) Winged Blades Godric 04:21, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Mayors of Teaneck, New Jersey
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Renominating for deletion as WP:listcruft. List of mayors of a town of about 40,000 fails WP:GNG Rusf10 (talk) 18:35, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep See: Articles for deletion/Mayors of Teaneck, New Jersey closed less than an hour ago as keep, the WP:GNG concerns articles, not lists, and there is no mention of 40,000 anywhere in the GNG. If Teaneck, New Jersey article can have a list of mayors and it is too large, it gets its own standalone list. --RAN (talk) 20:08, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of New Jersey-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 20:39, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 20:41, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 20:43, 9 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Comment -- So ask yourself, "What is the use of a list of 36 names, of which 9 have articles?" Would a reader do an analysis of the country of origin of the mayors? Or take the mean and standard deviation of terms of office? I doubt it. It's not like this is a list of governors or presidents.  The list is there for the fun of the person who thought it up ... or to provide amusement for the folks who want to delete it.  If you wanted to know who was the mayor in 1913, you'd want to know what he or she did.  The name alone does you absolutely no good. And no one bothered to fill in the blanks in six years. Half of the table is unreferenced, so it's original research.  Rhadow (talk) 03:12, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
 * "Half of the table is unreferenced" is incorrect, the entire list is referenced in the opening paragraph. The other references are supplemental. "What is the use of a list", I cannot read minds, so I do not know why people want articles on sports statistics, movies that I will never watch, or 1,500 years of popes or 2,000 years of Egyptian pharaohs. --RAN (talk) 04:35, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Hello RAN -- I dispute neither the accuracy of the list, nor the love that the editor put into its creation. I doubt its usefulness for the reasons described before. Think like Kant. Would WP be improved by the inclusion of 19,000 similar articles for every municipality in the United States?  As a matter of wikilawyering, the primary basis for the article -- the town's own website, the library -- is not an independent source. It is a primary source. The government is not an infallible source, as the last year has shown us. If NJ.com (the Star-Ledger) had reprinted it, then it would be legit.


 * Imagine how many articles there would be if we had one for every movie. ... Oh, wait we do. There must be over 50,000 articles out of the 500,000 films in existence. I have never watched all of them or read all the articles, so the articles are useless cruft to me. --RAN (talk) 07:21, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree that there are other lists in WP that are unlikely to be of use either. I am on a tear to dump articles about (probably living) cricket players about whom we don't even know their first names.
 * If you want some real work and New Jersey of interest to you, investigate the extent of school segregation in New Jersey schools that results from the state's division into 678 school districts. There is plenty of press on the topic and it can be confirmed using a secondary source, the National Center for Education Statistics.
 * Don't stop contributing or defending the articles you believe in. Rhadow (talk) 11:32, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I disagree with your discounting of government sources, suggesting that somehow a government source becomes legit just because a newspaper reprints the information. A strict application of WP:PRIMARY does not serve this project (although its general advice is correct). Professional researchers are trained to evaluate the legitimacy of any source, recognizing that reliability is a scale, not black and white. Even within a larger primary source, reliability might vary. A list of current municipal officials may only exist on the city's website. Under normal circumstances, there is no reason to suspect its accuracy (while the biographies of each member might be less reliable) (and while somehow, a newspaper using that information makes it correct). In this case, the information comes from the town library - and should be considered a secondary source, rather than a primary source. --Enos733 (talk) 17:36, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Just to clarify, are you saying the article should be deleted (or improved)?--Rusf10 (talk) 17:36, 13 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Merge to article on Teaneck, New Jersey. There is absolutely no reason to have this as a seperate article.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:49, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep (A merge can be acceptable as well because of the value of the information). While it is not up to us to determine the usefulness of an article, but whether (in this case) the list contains notable and verifiable information (however, I think the information is valuable). --Enos733 (talk) 17:21, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Comment -- Hello Enos733 -- You surrender all power when you say, "it is not up to us to determine the usefulness of an article." You are leaving it all up to to the city editor of a newspaper with inches to fill and to a book publisher who needs to make her quota. I disagree with you in a most collegial way. Rhadow (talk) 17:31, 10 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep This is a part of the topic Teaneck, so deletion would be destructive of the ability of editors to maintain the encyclopedic balance between the two articles.  It is a utility vehicle that as a redirect target protects individual articles on mayors from anti-notability arguments, so supports WP:PRESERVE.  In spite of the claim of the nomination that this is listcruft, this is not a list, and WP:listcruft itself says that articles on x are preferred to articles on List of x.  One way this article could be expanded is to explain how mayors in Teaneck are selected and their duties.  Unscintillating (talk) 03:07, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, this most certainly is a list, despite the fact the article is not named "list of". If you'd like to know how the mayor is selected, we already have this article: Township (New Jersey).--Rusf10 (talk) 01:04, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
 * My statement is derived from the comment of the nomination that cites WP:Listcruft. As per that reference, when the title of the article is not "List of x", any list is a section of the article on x.  Unscintillating (talk) 16:52, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
 * That's wrong. An article can still be a list without being titled as such — not everybody knows that our actual naming convention for lists is "List of X" rather than just "X", so whether any given article is a list or not is determined by whether its content is a list or not, not whether or not it has the word "list" in its title. Bearcat (talk) 21:41, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Neither the title nor the content of this article are a list, and your claim regarding what people know and don't know remains unclear without a Wikilink to a reference. Unscintillating (talk) 23:27, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The content of the article is a list, and the fact that the title isn't "List of..." is irrelevant to the matter of what the content is. Bearcat (talk) 02:00, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
 * WP:Listcruft states, "In general, a 'list of X' stand-alone list article should only be created if X itself is a legitimate encyclopedic topic that already has its own article. The list should originate as a section within that article, and should not be broken out into a separate article until it becomes so long as to be disproportionate to the rest of the article."I also reviewed WP:SAL. "A stand-alone list should begin with a lead section that summarizes its content, provides any necessary background information, gives encyclopedic context, links to other relevant articles, and makes direct statements about the criteria by which members of the list were selected, unless inclusion criteria are unambiguously clear from the article title. This introductory material is especially important for lists that feature little or no other non-list prose in their article body."  Unscintillating (talk) 03:14, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Exactly all of which describes precisely what's in this article, and exactly none of which suggests that the lack of the words "list of" in its title somehow magically makes it not a list even though its content is fully consistent with what that description says about what defines a list. Bearcat (talk) 04:02, 17 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep - There's no constructive, positive impact or contribution from the deletion of this type of valuable content. None whatsoever. The deletions here lack a long-term vision in favor of short-term deletions wins. Unfortunately, these are the types of potential deletions that expose deep (but fixable) flaws in Wikipedia, a project meant to be in depth and all encompassing, including the arenas of politics and local history. No professional historian, journalist, or political analyst would ever advocate the removal of this type of information or the officeholders in it. Teaneck and its mayors have always been politically influential in North Jersey, the larger New York City metro area, and New Jersey as a whole. This list, and the mayors that have unfortunately been listed for deletion, are no exception.Scanlan (talk) 01:20, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually, no, Wikipedia is not meant to be "all-encompassing" — that would mean we would have to keep articles about non-winning candidates for political office too, which we don't. Rather, we have actual standards for distinguishing notable from non-notable article topics. Bearcat (talk) 21:52, 16 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Comment -- Scanlan claims that, "Teaneck and its mayors have always been politically influential in ... the larger New York City metro area.]]. If this were so, then the list should be merged with New York metropolitan area. The bigger question is why one would write about the Teaneck mayor, who under the Faulkner Act, is a council person who chairs meetings, and has no other distinct authority (like veto). The mayor is not, strictly, speaking, an elected position. He or she is an elected council person, but elected as mayor by the rest of the council. Rhadow (talk) 14:31, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Faulkner was a mayor from a town now 39K. The Faulkner Act was originally enacted in 1950 and significantly amended in 1981.  If you read our article, you will see that the first person that we now describe as a mayor of Teaneck was selected with a 1798 act.  As to your perhaps unintended suggestion to expand to Local government of Teaneck, that could work, as there is already a section on local government in Township of Teaneck.  Unscintillating (talk) 23:48, 15 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep, unless somebody's got a more compelling deletion rationale. The fact that Teaneck's mayors would not be automatically presumed notable per WP:NPOL means we shouldn't have standalone biographical articles about most of them — although it's important to remember that some of them went on to serve in the New Jersey state legislature and/or the United States Congress, so some of the articles ain't going anywhere. But the question of whether the people in the list would qualify for their own individual biographies or not has no bearing on whether a list of their names should exist or not. Maybe it shouldn't, and I'm certainly willing to listen to and consider in good faith a deletion argument that keeps its eye on what we're actually talking about — but NPOL is about whether individual people in politics do or don't qualify for standalone BLPs, and has nothing to say about lists of officeholders one way or the other. Bearcat (talk) 21:52, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
 * In the original nomination (which I withdrew), I mentioned NPOL which applies to individual mayors. You are correct, it would not apply to the list. I have not mentioned it in this discussion. My reasoning here is that the article is an unnecessary list that fails GNG. Mayors of a town this size are normally not a notable topic. Overall, the mayors of this town have not received significant coverage (keeping in mind you need more than a handful of articles to cover over 100 years of history). I also believe WP:Indiscriminate applies here as well.--Rusf10 (talk) 22:10, 16 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Actually your rationale for deletion was WP:listcruft which is a personal essay about things that the person that wrote it dislikes, it is not policy concerning lists, and if you had actually read it, you would have seen that it, in fact, validates the concept of breaking out lists from articles: "Valid examples of standalone lists would include List of University of Chicago people and List of Oz books. In both cases, the lists correspond closely to encyclopedia articles — University of Chicago and L. Frank Baum." So "Mayors of Teaneck, New Jersey" should exist because we have an article "Teaneck, New Jersey" based on the essay WP:listcruft. Like the Bible, you have to read it, if you are going to quote it. --RAN (talk) 03:33, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Like the bible, somehow two people read the same thing and come up with totally different interpretations. What it say is "n general, a "list of X" stand-alone list article should only be created if X itself is a legitimate encyclopedic topic that already has its own article." In this case x is actually "Mayors of Teaneck" because despite the title of the article being the same, it is actually a list of mayors of Teaneck. I know you and another editor now added a opening paragraph to try and claim it is not a list but when I nominated the article it contained nothing but a list (and the one paragraph really doesn't change anything). Mayors of Teaneck is not a legitimate topic. If we go with your interpretation, since Teaneck is a legit topic, we can now have articles such as "list of street names in Teaneck", "list of bus stops in Teaneck", "list of everyone who's ever lived in Teaneck", and so on.--Rusf10 (talk) 03:53, 17 December 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.