Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Paul Newell (politician)


 * 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. The raw count is just on the edge of what would normally be considered a consensus, but looking at the arguments to keep, there's not a lot there.

The arguments from the article's creator fail to distinguish between subject has done interesting things and subject has received coverage as required by our notability guidelines. makes a reasonable argument about coverage in the NY Times. However, I find the counter-arguments that, due to the nature of this subject, the NYT's coverage should be classified as local and routine, to be compelling. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:57, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Paul Newell (politician)

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WP:BLP of a person notable primarily as an as-yet-unelected candidate in a future election. As always, candidates are not entitled to Wikipedia articles just for being candidates -- if you cannot make and properly source a credible claim that they were already eligible for a Wikipedia article before becoming a candidate, then they do not become notable enough for a Wikipedia article until they win the election. But the only other substantive thing here is that he served as district leader of his political party's local chapter, which is not something that gets a person over WP:NPOL. And as sourcing goes, we have a little bit of WP:ROUTINE local coverage of his non-winning candidacies for office, and a lot of primary, neighbourhood-weekly and blogspotty sourcing for everything else -- which means that WP:GNG has not been demonstrated. Delete, without prejudice against recreation on or after election day if he wins the seat. Bearcat (talk) 23:17, 24 February 2016 (UTC)


 * What are you talking about? He's *been* elected. A district leader is not a general term but the actual name of an elected position in New York City. Did anyone bother to read the article and look at the sources? He's up for ANOTHER position, yes, but IS CURRENTLY IN AN ELECTED POSITION. thanks.--A21sauce (talk) 22:37, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * You're completely misunderstanding what I said. Wikipedia does not confer automatic notability under WP:NPOL to every single holder of any political office at all just because that office was elected: he has to win his current campaign for election to the state legislature before he's eligible for a Wikipedia article, because that is the lowest level of office at which a person automatically gets into Wikipedia just because they won an election. "District leader" is not an office that automatically gets its holders into Wikipedia just for the fact of having been elected to it, because it does not represent serving in any legislative capacity — it's the equivalent of what I as a Canadian would know as the internal executive board of a political party's local electoral district association, which is not a notable office in its own right either. So right now, the only real notability claim present here at all is his status as an unelected candidate to a more notable office than the one he currently holds, and none of the sourcing is good enough to grant him a WP:GNG pass in lieu of failing NPOL. Bearcat (talk) 17:11, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat (talk) 18:53, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of New York-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:43, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I think you're being extremely technical here. Newell isn't some small-town district leader. He reps New York City's Chinatown, Financial District, and the Lower East Side, each of which have substantial Wikipedia articles of their own. He is also the subject of a documentary, and has been in the press alot for going after one of the most corrupt New York state politicians of all time, Sheldon Silver. If you'd review these articles and take step back and think a little, it'd really serve the Wiki cause, I think. Don't be so narrow minded, just because you happen not to like New York City or never visited or something;)A21sauce (talk) 08:11, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It's got nothing to do with me being "narrow-minded", I don't hate New York City and I have been there. The fact that the districts have Wikipedia articles does not mean that every single thing or every single person in the districts qualifies for a separate article, because notability is not inherited: each subtopic has to be independently notable in its own right, and does not get a "because of where it is" freebie. And it's none of our concern whether the incumbent politician he's running against is good, bad, corrupt, pure or any other adjective besides "incumbent" — Wikipedia is not a free hosting platform for unelected candidates' campaign brochures or a news organization. It's not our role to take any position at all on who should or shouldn't win any election — our job begins and ends at neutrally documenting who did win the election once it's over. Wikipedia's rules about this kind of stuff exist for real reasons: our entire value as a project depends on ensuring that we're not devolving into a free public relations platform for people who aspire to become notable but haven't gotten there yet. Bearcat (talk) 17:29, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, — UY Scuti Talk  18:24, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete as searches found nothing better. SwisterTwister   talk  03:28, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep as subject is notable as having been the subject of a documentary and the first to challenge Sheldon Silver since the 1980s. Wikipedia has articles on the most minute of fantasy video game characters and it's hypocritical that we can't budge on this for someone who's been elected to a district of 500,000 people.--A21sauce (talk) 05:07, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
 * It doesn't matter whether someone is the first, second, tenth, fiftieth or nine hundred millionth person to challenge the incumbent in one, two, ten, fifty or nine hundred million years — if they don't already have enough preexisting notability to have earned a Wikipedia article regardless of their candidacy for office, then they have to win the seat to become notable enough.
 * Wikipedia simply cannot allow itself to become a repository of campaign brochures for every non-winning candidate to every political office in the world. There are 435 seats in the US House of Representatives alone and typically four or five candidates for election to each seat, the elections take place every two years and there are usually a handful of special elections in between if an incumbent congressperson dies in office or resigns — thus meaning we would have to keep and maintain over 10,000 articles about non-winning candidates for election to that body per decade. Then we have to do the same thing for the US Senate, and every individual state legislature in all 50 US states, and every mayoral candidate in every city in the country — which easily gets us over 100,000 articles about non-winning candidates, before you even take into account that then we would have to do the exact same thing for Canada, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Germany, France, Brazil, Poland, India, Spain, Mexico and every other multiparty electoral democracy in the world too.
 * That is simply not tenable — which is why we have specific notability standards, namely being elected to a notable office, that politicians have to meet before they become eligible for Wikipedia articles. And "district leader" is not a notable office, and the sourcing here is not good enough to make him more notable than all the other district leaders who don't have articles. Bearcat (talk) 20:12, 3 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep - I'm not sure about the additional stipulations the nom has mentioned, as the subject seems to pass WP:GNG, which should be sufficient. From this version of the article, sources 2, 3, and 9 look like significant coverage. Additionally, I've found this Gotham Gazette piece, which is an even more significant piece of coverage focusing more closely on the subject. Notice that these sources are covering two different elections, so I think WP:BLP1E is handled as well. A big chunk of the article's current sources are extremely poor, however, and should be trimmed out. —Torchiest talkedits 05:02, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Local media have an obligation to grant "equal time" coverage to all candidates in an election taking place in their local coverage area, so coverage of a candidate in the context of his candidacy in the local media falls under WP:ROUTINE and cannot assist in meeting GNG. If that kind of coverage were enough in and of itself, then every candidate for any office could always claim a GNG exemption from having to pass NPOL. Rather, coverage of a political candidate only counts toward GNG if it nationalizes far outside of their own local area, along the lines of what happened to Christine O'Donnell in 2010. If he got to the point where newspapers in Miami or Seattle or Chicago or Las Vegas were writing about his campaign, then there'd be a case for inclusion under GNG — but if the coverage just represents local newspapers doing their jobs by covering local candidates in local elections, then it doesn't exempt him from having to satisfy NPOL by winning the seat. Bearcat (talk) 16:50, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I disagree with your initial premise. Plenty of local candidates receive nothing more than their name being listed on a sample ballot, or being mentioned once at the end of an article about another candidate. This might be more common in local elections that are non-partisan, but it happens all the time, especially with third parties. And this is not routine coverage, specifically, the source I mentioned is a fairly in-depth profile. Outside of all that, WP:NPOL does not supersede WP:GNG, it supplements it. In other words, it provides a potential alternative to a subject simply meeting the standard GNG, which this one does. #3 at NPOL even explicitly says that: "such people can still be notable if they meet the primary notability criterion of 'significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject of the article'". —Torchiest talkedits 06:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
 * No, it's not true that any local candidate for office ever goes entirely uncovered by any media — the media have a legal obligation to provide coverage to all candidates. Even the fringiest no-hopers do get coverage — they may not get as much of it as the major party candidates who are likelier to actually win the election, but they do all get enough coverage that they could certainly try to make a "notable because GNG" claim. And by the way, the Gotham Gazette is a blog, not a source that can count toward whether a politician has gotten over GNG or not.
 * And NPOL is not an alternative to GNG, either — you're correct that they supplement each other, but you're incorrect about how that works in practice. Even the passage of NPOL still has to be referenceable to GNG-worthy sources to constitute an NPOL pass — and if a politician doesn't satisfy NPOL on their role itself, then it takes a certain specific class of coverage — i.e. nationalizing far beyond the bounds of what would be normally expected, or already having preexisting notability for something else outside of politics, neither of which have been shown here at all — to get them over GNG instead of NPOL. A politician can't get over GNG just on the basis of local coverage in the local media if they haven't passed NPOL on the basis of the role, because all politicians get local coverage in the local media.
 * This isn't a rule I made up myself just to be tendentious, either, but the consensus position on how GNG applies to political candidates — the problem is that politics is one of those fields of endeavour in which people are especially prone to trying to misuse Wikipedia as a public relations platform or a POV agenda farm. The fact that we're so vulnerable to getting exploited as a webhost for unelected candidates' campaign brochures is precisely why we have to be so strict in our inclusion criteria for politicians. Bearcat (talk) 22:30, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Bearcat, there are tons of categories of people and things on Wikipedia that really count as miscellany. I'm not sure why you're harping on this, and say, not EQUALLY on a fantasy video game character or a TV show that aired for a week. One wonders what your real beef is. Your repetition of the word unelected is intellectually dishonest, so please quit that at the very least. --A21sauce (talk) 03:48, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * As has been pointed out to you before, not all political offices that exist automatically get their holders past WP:NPOL. He is a candidate for, but has not won election to, the state legislature — a level of office that will get him a Wikipedia article if he wins it — but has not held any ofice that gets him an NPOL pass today. The word "unelected" is not "intellectually dishonest"; you're misrepresenting the context in which it's being applied. And kindly read WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS: I can only deal with articles that I personally come across, and it is not my responsibility to go gallivanting all over Wikipedia looking for every bad article about some piece of miscellany that you don't like. Bearcat (talk) 01:46, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Your claim that "the media have a legal obligation to provide coverage to all candidates" has no basis that I'm aware of. If it were true, every media outlet would have to give coverage to every local candidate, yet that simply doesn't happen. I've seen plenty of elections where essentially every third party candidate gets nothing beyond their name on a list. Perhaps in Canada there are laws requiring such coverage, but this person is in the United States, which doesn't have any sort of equal coverage laws. If you disagree, I'd like you to point to a U.S. statute saying they're legally obligated to provide coverage of all candidates. Without such a statute, this is not routine coverage. Outside of that, your criteria for notability go beyond GNG: "a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". That's it. The reasons for the coverage don't matter, beyond surpassing WP:BLP1E, which has also been done by the fact there has been coverage spanning two elections. As for the Gotham Gazette, it's not clear why you're saying it's just a blog. It has a full editorial staff, which implies fact-checking and everything else that we generally require for a source to be considered reliable. And I've also never heard that local coverage is somehow insufficient. A reliable source is a reliable source. Your concerns about articles being political ads is quite reasonable, but if we're following reliable sources independent of the subject, and not just regurgitating primary sources, we won't have to worry about that. —Torchiest talkedits 03:16, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
 * For just one example, the FCC does have an "equal-time rule" for coverage of candidates — and yes, there are some loopholes to it, but the rule still exists. And you obviously don't follow our incredibly frequent AFD discussions on unelected political candidates very carefully, if you think it's difficult for a third-party or independent candidate to make a claim of passing GNG on the basis of having gotten media coverage — locating two or three or four pieces of local media coverage of a local political candidate is actually not an even remotely difficult thing to do. I have never, in fact, seen a single article about any unelected candidate for office in either Canada or the United States, major party or minor party or independent or total fringe nutter, that couldn't be referenced to enough media coverage that somebody could at least try to mount a claim that GNG had been passed and therefore NPOL was moot. And that's precisely why we have specific rules about how much, and what type of, coverage it takes to actually get a candidate over GNG. Bearcat (talk) 17:06, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
 * That FCC rule only applies to radio and television, neither of which are used for this article. I'm sure there are plenty of candidates who don't meet the GNG standard; that's my whole point. And I can list dozens of candidates who no one has ever even attempted to write articles for because they received zero coverage. This is not such a case. —Torchiest talk<sub style="margin-left:-3ex;">edits 18:20, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I said the FCC's rule was one example of the fact that such obligations do exist, in response to your claim that no such rule existed in any form of media at all, not that the FCC governed newspapers. The fact that the coverage here is in newspapers, not broadcast media, does not inherently exempt it from being the type of coverage that candidates routinely get — newspapers do cover "So-and-so wins party's nomination for the next election", newspapers do cover "local political organizer does local-organizer things", newspapers do cover "independent or fringe candidate wants your vote". Coverage of that type is not hard to find for almost any candidate at all, and its existence does not inherently prove that one particular candidate is automatically more notable than all of the others who are getting the same treatment.
 * And you're entirely missing my point — there are plenty of candidates who don't meet the GNG standard, true, but that's because we have strict rules about the volume and type of coverage that a candidate has to get to actually pass GNG. There are lots of candidates out there for whom the coverage isn't enough, because the standards are purposely designed to require more than the normal volume and type of coverage — but there are not a lot (certainly not "dozens") of candidates for whom no media coverage exists whatsoever. And the volume and type of coverage shown here does not lift him into a higher realm of GNG-worthiness than the others — nothing here is outside of the ordinary level of local coverage for a person at this level. Bearcat (talk) 18:42, 11 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete - Routine coverage does not equate to WP:GNG. Nom's rationale is sound.  Onel 5969  <i style="color:blue">TT me</i> 14:16, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - per Bearcat. WP:POLOUTCOMES provides useful guidance when dealing with local elected officials . "Local politicians whose office would not ordinarily be considered notable may still clear the bar if they have received national or international press coverage, beyond the scope of what would ordinarily be expected for their role." Nothing sourced to date suggests that the subject received national or international press coverage. Enos733 (talk) 23:06, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Umm, see notes #10 and 11, just added. Or here. Not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? I guess not. Did anyone bother to do a search at nytimes.com? A21sauce (talk) 01:36, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * He's a local organizer and candidate in New York City, so The New York Times is a local paper in this particular context. To count as "national coverage beyond the scope of what would ordinarily be expected", the coverage would have to be coming from papers at a geographic remove from NYC, such as the Washington Post or the Chicago Sun-Times or the Miami Herald or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer or the Los Angeles Times — but if he's living and working and running in New York City, then NYT coverage falls under "what would ordinarily be expected", not "beyond the scope of", and thus does not get him a free pass around our criteria for local politicians just because the local paper involved is the NYT. Bearcat (talk) 15:48, 12 March 2016 (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.