Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Political positions of Jill Stein


 * 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. as unnecessary WP:SPLIT. Arguments for "keep" are mainly WP:OTHERSTUFF (not acceptable argument) and "notability is established" (but, the notability was not questioned at all). I am not convinced (with arguments) that this topic warrants separate article.  Vanjagenije  (talk)  22:39, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

Political positions of Jill Stein

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 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. SashiRolls (talk) 23:25, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. SashiRolls (talk) 23:25, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. SashiRolls (talk) 23:25, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

This is an unnecessary WP:POVFORK. I also have several additional concerns:
 * Content relating to Stein's political positions, philosophy, statements, etc. can be placed (and indeed is currently placed) at the main biographical article, Jill Stein or Jill Stein presidential campaign, 2016, or  Jill Stein presidential campaign, 2012. The source material on Stein's positions is not so voluminous that it requires a separate article. (Stein does not have a long record in public office).
 * A separate article not only atomizes content, but also encourages content sprawl and inclusion of long quotations or other unencyclopedic material.
 * Article is unlikely to be expanded.
 * Similar underdeveloped or unnecessary "Political positions..." articles have been found to not be independently notable in the past, e.g.: Articles for deletion/Political positions of Michael Bloomberg; Articles for deletion/Political positions of Ann Coulter; Articles for deletion/Political positions of Bill Richardson. --Neutralitytalk 21:18, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
 * In addition to the article creator (tagged above), I am tagging the following editors who have weighed in on this article:, , , , . Neutralitytalk 21:31, 30 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete - There is not a sufficient amount of meaninful political position material to justify a spinoff article. Many of her political positions range from aspirational to down right ludicrous, and are not the type of information that we would typically document in an independent article. - MrX 21:43, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete as per WP:POVFORK and the well-articulated concerns expressed by User:Neutrality. Note also that this article was created during discussions about the "positions" sections on Jill Stein in which article creator had just proposed creating this page and  a fellow editor has said  not a good idea.  I am not suggestion that a single editor's opinion must rule a second editor, only that That discussion should have been continued before creating this page.E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:47, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep . All of the other main presidential candidates have a "Political Positions of" page, and those most active on Jill Stein's biography page (see Talk:Jill Stein) seem to wish to deny her this privilege. Note that no edits have been made to the page since it was split, and I am following consensus and editing at her bio page while her political positions remain on that page. To respond to Neutrality, Bloomberg never ran for President, Jill has done so twice, and to be honest I've never heard of Bill Richardson, so cannot comment. SashiRolls (talk) 22:31, 30 August 2016 (UTC) SashiRolls is article creator. E.M.Gregory (talk) 22:36, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
 * More to the point, Darrell Castle does not. Stein has never held political office except for being a member of the Lexington town meeting.  Few if any RS regard her as a "main presidential candidate."E.M.Gregory (talk) 22:41, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
 * For Wikipedian practices, see Political positions of the United States presidential candidates by political affiliation, 2016 (table that I did not add though I am a Wikipedian.) SashiRolls (talk) 23:08, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
 * That page has had exactly 36 edits in the 2 months of its exisentce, almost all of them by the article creator, that gets~ 10 pageviews per day, and on which every single topic is marked "unknown" in the Jill Stein column. imho, the lack of active editing and paltry sourcing on that page demonstrate the problem with multiplying articles on minor political figures like Stein.  As does Political positions of Cynthia McKinney although she, unlike Stein, was elected to Congress, and in that sense the article is not as absurd as Political positions of Ben Carson, although even Carson did have a period when he was polling serious numbers of voters. The McKinney positions page, sourced heavily to blogs, including 911truth.org, is a poster child for the problem of having articles of this type. It was created in 2008 when McKinney was the Green Party candidate for president, was written almost entirely by a single editor who has long since left this project, and has not been meaningfully improved in the decade it has existed.E.M.Gregory (talk)
 * Note that Political positions of Cynthia McKinney now redirects to Cynthia McKinney.E.M.Gregory (talk) 17:07, 1 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep multi-time presidential candidate's with political positions covered in extensively by independent, reliable sources.--TM 00:22, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete The parent article is not long enough to justify a fork, and can probably be trimmed a bit anyway. Timothy Joseph Wood  00:59, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. The candidate is far less notable than Clinton, Trump and Johnson. Her political positions are not extensive enough to be covered in a separate article (they fit neatly into her main article). I provide other reasons on the Jill Stein talk page but those are the gist of my objections to a separate Stein Positions article. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 10:52, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. North America1000 03:00, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. North America1000 03:00, 31 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep - the political positions is not a POV fork but is a division of the prior article to fit existing practices as shown in other candidates, so it fits the WP:SPINOFF accepted section at WP:POVFORK. Also, conceptually the Jill Stein page is a BLP so it should focus on her life and chronology, and maybe change over time of politics -- but not a detailed focus.  Markbassett (talk) 02:09, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment One problem I am having in squaring this with the other pages in our category Category:Political positions of United States presidential candidates, 2016 is that, Trump excepted, all of those candidates have political records as holders of major office where they actually took positions. (Note the "Political positions of Carly Fiorina", like those of several other contenders for major party nomination, redirects).  This means that their Political positions pages can be reliably sourced to secondary  coverage of their positions on issues they were involved with as elected officials.  Jill Stein's page, however, is heavily - and perhaps inevitably - primary sourced, not only to jill2016.com  but all the way down to source # 16, ""Dr. Jill Stein on Twitter". Retrieved 2016-07-28.".  sources # 3 and # 4 are Jill Stein press releases, ;  no fewer than 6 items are cited to http://www.jill2016.com/plan   It is also heavily sourced to partisan sites that may or may not be independent of Stein, the first source on the page is occupy.com,   Many other positions are cited to obscure blogs/websites including: lumpenproletariat.org , Rainbow.org , www.p2012.org, and youtube postings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzwZtmTEMuw   I could go on, there's more of this sort.  My question is whether it is even possible to reliably source an article on a third party candidate who has never held a significant public office (she was a member of the Lexington town meeting) and who, therefore, has no press coverage on issue positions outside of what comes during a political campaign.E.M.Gregory (talk) 13:47, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Your activism on both Jill Stein's page and Ajamu Baraka's make it such that I'm not surprised by your comments. Of course, given your activism, you know that none of the tweets mentioned have been added by the creator of this page, but have been primarily (if not exclusively) added by Snooganssnoogans (above).  One might cynically believe the goal in preventing this page from existing, despite clearly established precedent, is to ensure that people seeking to learn more about Jill Stein don't have to click twice in order to see the writing I and others have slowly and patiently managed to tone down towards neutrality in the past weeks despite the user's consistent unwillingness to compromise (or even talk cf.  lack of response to [User:AndrewOne|AndrewOne] here for one example among many).  (It should be noted that Snooganssnoogans is the author of much of this page User Contribution Search.  Since August, I have become more active providing balancing material in the past month, Snooganssnoogans continues to be active, and has provided us with, for example 16 references to the same Washington Post interview here, which strikes me (and others in print) as both an unbalanced source (given the questions) and undue weight.  Nevertheless, in the spirit of "consensus" of those involved on a daily basis reverting efforts aimed at improving the article to remove the anti-bias tag on the Jill Stein page in late August, I have not removed those links, despite the obvious bias of the way in which the questions the Post asked her (already expressing the Post's negative point of view (as for Sanders)) have been used.  But I'll assume "good faith" and admit that there are some things in life I could not understand behind that veil of ignorance. ^^


 * To respond to the substantive claim in your argument, to the best of my knowledge, Noam Chomsky, and Christopher Hitchens and Ralph Nader have never held political office, yet all three have political positions pages... SashiRolls (talk) 14:32, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Political positions of Ralph Nader turns out to be a poster child for all the problems with Political positions of articles created for minor candidates during campaigns, especially bad sourcing.E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:20, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Note, however, that Political positions of Tim Kaine and Political positions of Mike Pence redirect to their pages, as several of us are proposing to redirect this to Jill Stein. Nor do we have Political Positions of Darrell Castle or Political Positions of Ben Carson, candidates who share the sourcing problem I perceive with Stein, that is, the fact because she has never been elected to a significant office or been a significant player in the national and international political conversation, we lack the kind of analysis by political scientists, policy analysts and political journalists that enables us to reliably source articles on Noam Chomsky, and Christopher Hitchens and Ralph Nader. Perhaps it is merely WP:TOOSOON.E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:09, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Striking part of my comment because on examining those 3 articles I find that I was incorrect; the Caldwell and Chomsky pages both suffer from excessive reliance on primary sourcing, while Political positions of Ralph Nader is so bad it that needs to be redirected or deleted. The point is that all 3 articles held up as models by User:SashiRolls appear to reinforce my hypothesis that sources (or something) makes it close to impossible to source good articles on the political positions of individuals who have not served in major political office.E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:34, 1 September 2016 (UTC)


 * In my opinion, to meet WP:HEY an editor would have to remove the WP:FANCRUFT from the page along with all the blogs and everything that cannot be sources as per WP:RS, and turn this into at least an early version of something that might conceivably become WP:GOOD. I just spent a little time nosing around, and my impression is that RS  do not at this point exist to either properly source such an article, or to support its notability.  It is simply WP:TOOSOON to source an article of this type on Stein. E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:09, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. In principle, there can be both a bio page and a political views page for a particular political figure. However, to make it an editorially desirable separation, there should be a good reason for the political views page to explore content that does not fit at the bio page, and also, both pages must be equally balanced and neutral in POV. Here, however, this really is a WP:POV fork, intended to bypass content disputes at the bio page. The content is pretty much just copy-pasted, and it seems unlikely that there will be sufficient reason in the next year or so for this page to go into additional content. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:07, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete per WP:POVFORK, and possibly containing OR based on primary sources, such "JS on Twitter" etc. K.e.coffman (talk) 18:38, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep. There are sources:  and  from Rolling Stone,  from Politico,  from Newsweek,  from NBC News,  from Bustle,  from CNN,  from The Washington Post,  from The Post-Standard,  from The Seattle Times,  from Slate.  These articles not just "Jill Stein is running for President" stories; they analyze her political positions and compare/contrast them to other candidates.  If the article is problematic, it can be fixed.  I skimmed over it, and it looks like there are some questionable sources.  But it's possible to find better ones. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 02:08, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment -- I believe the above sources are best added to the main article Jill Stein. Since she's described there as a "perennial candidate" I believe it's best to keep the material on her political positions there. K.e.coffman (talk) 05:38, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Agreeing with K.e.coffman's comment just above, I don't think that anyone questions the existence of sufficient sources to satisfy WP:GNG. Instead, the issue is that satisfying notability does not make it mandatory to have a separate page. Here, there are issues of WP:SOAP, WP:NOTNEWS, and WP:IINFO. --Tryptofish (talk) 14:44, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Note. SashiRolls has been topic-banned from Jill Stein-related content as an Arbitration Enforcement sanction. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:36, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep as per above Keep arguments. It's a fork but a notable one.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 22:45, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Again, I really do not think that notability is the issue here. --Tryptofish (talk) 14:07, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
 * See WP:ITSNOTABLE in Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions: simply asserting "it's notable" isn't really an argument at all. Neutralitytalk 22:45, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete per WP:POVFORK as others have mentioned. While there is potential to have standalone political views articles of BLPs in the case of candidates, there isn't really justification for separation from the BLP in this case. The more appropriate case is to keep developing content on the parent page and create the daughter article if there is significant enough content to be standalone to avoid overtaking the BLP article per WP:SPINOFF. I don't really see that happening since political views are her main claim to fame. Kingofaces43 (talk) 14:31, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Improve content instead of deleting

The various suggested reasons for deleting the "Political Positions of Jill Stein" page strike me as odd and unconvincing. Clearly there is a public information value in having positions of the presidential candidates readily accessible on separate neutral Wikipedia pages. There are such separate pages for Clinton, Trump and Johnson, and they have evidently generated no such "debate" within Wikipedia. Trump has never held public office, and well into the primaries the "positions" listed on his website were far less detailed than what Stein's site shows. So what can be fundamentally wrong with having an objective separate Wikipedia page on such stances, instead of sandwiching that in with all sorts of other material, or leaving readers to wade through the candidates' own sales pitches?

Of course, "political positions" can instead be made a subsection of the "presidential campaign" page or the main biographical page (the latter is the case for Evan McMullin, the only other minor presidential candidate besides Stein showing well about 1% in a state presidential poll (9% in Utah in August), but his campaign is not even a month old, and if it grows in popularity that could certainly and quite understandably also lead to a "positions" page for him as well, even though he also has never held elected office before). The fuss about "primary" versus "secondary" sources also seems weird. Clearly both types of source are beneficial, but the actual stated positions (primary) are going to be more relevant and useful to most readers. Moreover, while the Wikipedia guideline on notability says "if no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article," that is evidently not very relevant here: There are now already many referenced news article and analyses, and many ≠ "no".

This tempest in a teapot discussion appears to have little tangible effect except to make things slightly more confusing for readers and editors than they need to be. I favor removing the distracting and misleading flags, and getting on with remedying the shortcomings of the political position text. If part of the problem here is that many of Stein's positions have been vague, not well-informed, or inconsistent (in "contrast" to the crystal clear, credible and unwavering utterances of Trump, Clinton, Johnson, and almost any other national politician), then by all means make that part of the Wikipedia text, but I vote (if that is in any sense the right verb) for taking off the flags and winding up this tangential talk page. DK Drewkeeling (talk) 22:33, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Correction: I meant, in my final sentence above, to advocate winding up this "article for deletion" discussion. Of course, Wikipedia pages generally have a "talk page" available, and I do not mean to suggest there being exception to that for pages on Stein or her candidacy. Drewkeeling (talk) 22:42, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment I think user:K.e.coffman gets it right above: "Since she's described there as a "perennial candidate" I believe it's best to keep the material on her political positions there." Note that Stein has never won any of the posts she has run for (except at her local town meeting) and that we have "political positions" pages on individuals who have held significant office, but not on Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney nor on notable perennial candidates Harold Stassen, Eugene Debs or Ralph Nadar.E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:48, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - POV Fork or campaign propaganda/anti-candidate coatrack. Not an encyclopedic topic, ephemeral current events political esoterica. The important stuff should be in the biography already. Carrite (talk) 21:37, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. Hillary must win. 184.101.237.225 (talk) 06:29, 9 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep for its usefulness for 2016 voters and other interested parties. I find it a bit spurious the comments of various that those positions may be less firm than those of established pols. And so what if they aren't referenced by "reliable" sources-does a ref from CNN et al convey legitimacy on the view of the candidate? If the media haven't reported on the Political positions of Jill Stein that could say more about the media than the views. Besides, it's a list of Political positions that voters may peruse and compare, not the candidates voting records or actions (comparing the 3 for some candidates/pols may make an interesting page). For me, if you delete this one then delete the Political positions pages of all candidates. I don't advocate that-I say let the views stay in wikipedia where they can be linked to the topics. A valid comment may be that after the 2016 election, what becomes of the page, as views change and become dated... eg Political positions of Hillary Clinton was created in 2006‎, but its intro refers to 2016 {disclaimer-I am not a US voter. I have recently edited the page} DadaNeem (talk) 21:46, 9 September 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't think that WP:OTHERSTUFF arguments really apply, because there are different considerations that come into play in each case. I agree that the information is of interest to voters, but the same information is available at Jill Stein. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:42, 9 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Redirect - article is a direct copy-paste from the already existent Jill Stein article and there's not enough sufficient content on its own to justify a separate article. There is nothing to include in a separate article that can't already be included into the parent article. Usually I'm all for having separate articles for political positions, but Stein's notability does not amount to that of Clinton's or Trump's or Huckabee's or Bush's or any democrat or republican for that matter. That's further evidenced by the fact that, if such an event were to occur where this article would stay its own separate article, and any editor just came to the Jill Stein article and trimmed down the political positions section in the presence of a separate article (as does usually happen with splits), you'd hardly still have an article. Last and foremost, this is not a discussion of whether an article should be delete, its a discussion on if a section within an article should have its own article. — Mythdon 23:27, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom et al.. Stein is not a "main" presidential candidate; she is polling, at most, a single point. Almost all of the material in the article is "mirrored" from her own website, a violation of both WP:COPYVIO and WP:RS, or a run of the mill rehash of the Green Party platform. I would be less annoyed if criticism of her more controversial positions were analyzed in detail, such as her anti-vaccination stance, but right now, it's little more than crufty agitprop. I really don't see that it could be improved, but please, go ahead and prove me wrong. For what it's worth, I support the other woman. Bearian (talk) 18:21, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep. As the evidence assembled by NinjaRobotPirate shows, notability is not an issue, and the material is substantive enough that an article is justifiable. I find no evidence that it has been created to change the POV of the main article, and therefore it does not appear to be a POVFORK, but an appropriate spinoff. The question then becomes "can we fit all this content into the main article?" Purely on the basis of length, we could: but we would then have an article dominated by her political positions. If the existence of this spinoff allows the main article to be balanced in terms of content, then I would prefer to keep the spinoff. Vanamonde (talk) 08:40, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
 * It's true that the two pages do not particularly differ in content at this time. However, the editor who created the Political positions page (now topic-banned) did so in order to fend off efforts to NPOV the bio page. There does not seem to me to be a problem of balance at the main bio article, so there is no need for the spinoff to fix that. She is notable as a political candidate, so it's appropriate to emphasize her political positions. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:42, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. unjustified split. The motivation might be promotional for her political views, but it doesn't matter. It's justified only for major party candidate.  DGG ( talk ) 21:32, 14 September 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.