Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Paul J. Feiner


 * 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The result was   nomination withdrawn due to sourcing improvements. Bearcat (talk) 00:30, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Paul J. Feiner

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WP:BLP of a politician notable primarily as a town supervisor and a non-winning candidate for election to Congress. Neither of these are claims that satisfy NPOL — outside of the rarefied class of major metropolitan global cities a municipal councillor gets an article only if he can be sourced and substanced well enough to pass WP:GNG, and non-winning candidates for office are only eligible for articles if they were already eligible for some other reason independent of their candidacy. And the sourcing here is entirely of the primary source variety — a meeting schedule on the town's website and his own self-published Blogspot blog — so GNG hasn't been met, or even really attempted, either. Delete. Bearcat (talk) 23:28, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Is it WP:SPIP? No independent sources. Delete. 45sixtyone (talk) 23:56, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Hard to tell about whether it was self-promotional, it looks possible, but since it fails notability it really does not matter. --Bejnar (talk) 16:40, 15 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete fails NPOL, and aside from articles about his status as a candidate for New York's 20th congressional district, there is no significant coverage. --Bejnar (talk) 16:40, 15 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. Town supervisor for 24 years and counting of town of 88k residents, who does seem to have garnered sufficient independent RS coverage to satisfy GNG, particularly this lengthy piece in the NY Times. I will update sourcing in the article. --Hobbes Goodyear (talk) 23:27, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Have added 12 refs to the article, most of which address the subject extensively, including two lengthy NY Times pieces dedicated to this subject--the one mentioned above, and this one, about his trials and tribulations fundraising for his 1998 Congressional campaign. --Hobbes Goodyear (talk) 02:49, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * The piece linked in your first comment is definitely a step in the right direction. This one, however, doesn't contribute notability points — media have a public service obligation to grant coverage to all candidates in all election campaigns involving their coverage area, so campaign coverage falls under WP:ROUTINE and cannot count toward GNG except on the very rare occasion that it nationalizes into something on the order of the media firestorm that ate Christine O'Donnell in 2010. Bearcat (talk) 09:28, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I disagree with your reading of WP:ROUTINE. If it were an election summary with paragraphs about each of the candidates, of course, but this thousand-word profile in the Times surely exceeds routine coverage. --Hobbes Goodyear (talk) 10:17, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of New York-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:12, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:12, 17 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep per User:Hobbes Goodyear. Easily passes WP:GNG. Pburka (talk) 04:30, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * You are missing the point, we exclude articles about failed candidacies from consideration. When you take those away, you don't have much. --Bejnar (talk) 06:14, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * No one is arguing that subject is inherently notable under NPOL. Failure to qualify on NPOL grounds does not disqualify a subject who meets GNG. I would urge other editors to review the article, its refs, and other sources available online and judge for themselves whether subject meets the general notability guideline. --Hobbes Goodyear (talk) 10:17, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 13:38, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * strong Keep I ran a proquest news archive search, and just added a long article from the New York Times analyzing his first year as Supervisor.  The Times followed his work in that position for years, and also covered his runs for Congress.  As did other papers.   Extensive, detailed coverage of his political career in RS exists.E.M.Gregory (talk) 14:00, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * In addition to the one I put on the page, which is a long discussion of his first term as Supervisor, here is the search of the NYTimes archive on Finer: . It one about the tough time he has running for congress:  a feature story about a spat tiwh the Fire Chief involving an ethnic slur , a long profile of him as a political activist , in-depth coverage of his run for supervisor , a color story about a development battle between Feiner and a beloved golf driving range  - and that doesn't even get us to the end of the 1st page in the Times archibve search.  There is more in-depth stuff.  I am getting the idea that he was a colorful politician.  Of course, the Times website is password protected.  I am working from a machine wired into powerful search engines.  Do these stories not come up on searches non-subscribers to the New York Times run?  I can see where that would be a problem.E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:51, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Note that I didn't do more than scan these sources, but the coverage war far form positive. It if's a vanity article, it may be poor judgment on the creator's part.  We are all in User:Bearcat's debt for his labor screening ot non-notable, local politicians and pages for politician wannabes. but this one can be closed as keep.E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:57, 17 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep obviously more notable then your typical Miss Oregon USA who automatically gets an article based on one mention in a local paper. Legacypac (talk) 19:17, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete - I'm not convinced. Several sources have been added but they are of the "local interest" variety; we could likely find the same sort of coverage for any local-level politician who's served for a couple decades. It doesn't demonstrate notability. The NYTimes sources are compelling, but they are also exclusively confined to the "regional" section, the section for local-interest news, which also contains "Things to do in New Jersey" listings. I don't think that GNG is met, despite everyone's genuinely hard work to find sources. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:46, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I was surprised by your assertion, so I went back and checked. a search on: Paul J. Finer Greenburgh got over a thousand hits on Proquest.  I never see that many at an AFD; people with that kind of coverage don't get to AFD.  And that is despite the fact that hits on those 2 local papers seem not to have archives going back  to Feiner's most acttive era.  I did not read every article ans will not make grand sweeping claims about their being "exclusively confined" to any particular thing.  I did jump to p. 10 of the search, where it looked like coverage of routine county business.   But the earlier pages had many strange and colorful headlines.  Moreover, while many articles on Feiner are in the Westchester edition, others are not.  Westchester, of course, has a   population of a million people.   I'm not sure that we can dismiss the Westchester edition of the Times a s "local".   There are town-level papers, and were mre in Feiner's era. The The Journal News, is a recent merger of several of the local papers that were still lively in the Feiner era.  Coverage of Feiner in the Times is more like the activities of a particular suburban supervisor getting coverage in a major regional daily.   ( Oh, there is also coverage in the regional  Westchester County Business Journal).   In the Times, though, coverage takes on a different character.  They cover him as a character.  Because I thought that some of the stories I listed above weren't local, I clicked  one I hadn'd click on before, chosen for its colorful title, "Let the Circus Come to Town Greenburgh's Banning of Animal Performances Is a Misstep".  Not a "routine" story about a local town policy.  On Proquest I see that it ran in the Westchester edition on 9 June 2002; but searching the Times archive I find it in the International edition on June 9, 2002.  under shortened title  Soapbox: Let the Circus Come to Town, by JANE CHAMBLESS WRIGHT.  Then the Times ran a follow-up story  on 16 June,  " This was not a low-key, local debate. A hearing before Greenburgh's town supervisor, Paul J. Feiner drew more than 150 people and attention from animal rights advocates as far away as Maine, Florida and England. Circuses, speaker after speaker said, were little more than a tradition of sanctioned animal abuse.


 * What? Are they nuts? asked Lynn Goodman of North White Plains, standing outside the Cole Brothers tent before the last afternoon show. Has everyone gone crazy? The circus is great.


 * Animal advocates say it is impossible to create spectacles like elephants standing on their heads or tigers leaping through hoops of fire without terrifying the animals into submission." Clearly, Feiner was so colorful that the Times treated him to coverage beyond routine.  And at least sometimes ran it in non-Westchester editions.  If the edition of the paper is what this hangs on (I argue that the Westchester edition is a major regional, not a local paper)  - someone needs to comb through those articles before deleting.E.M.Gregory (talk) 11:51, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I fixed your indent, hope that's okay. I see what you mean, and you have access to a search tool that I don't think I do, so my review is based only on the sources which are already in the article and those I dug up on Google, which backed up my assertion, but I'll take your word on your search results. I think it's probable that Feiner has achieved notability only by inheriting it from things that happened in Westchester during his tenure as town supervisor (which is like mayor, I assume? a prominent position anyway) but then there's enough of those things and Feiner has been around long enough that we'd end up with an article on him even if we followed the letter of the guideline and only wrote articles about the events. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:33, 18 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep per the exchange above. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:34, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd still like to see a bit more improvement here if at all possible, but I'm convinced that enough has been done here to satisfy WP:GNG. While it's true that municipal-level politicians don't get an automatic WP:NPOL pass just for existing, they are eligible for consideration under NPOL #3 if a genuinely substantive and well-sourced article can be written — and this article is now quite a bit more substantive, and significantly better sourced, than it was at the time of nomination. Thanks to Hobbes Goodyear and E.M. Gregory. Bearcat (talk) 00:30, 19 December 2015 (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.