Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rachel Dolezal


 * 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. This discussion is closed early because it is quickly becoming apparent that there is a strong consensus to keep the article, and that it seems impossible that a consensus to delete could result from this discussion.  Sandstein  19:58, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Rachel Dolezal

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Per WP:BLP1E, this person is, outside of a single event, non-notable. The Interior (Talk) 05:47, 13 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Disagree. This person is listed among the notable Dolezals of the world on Wikipedia.  You might notice that some of these notable Dolezals, even though listed, don't even have their own page! (that's why their names are in red)  Have you proposed to eliminate those other Dolezals? XavierItzm (talk) 05:55, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Excuse me, but how would someone propose deletion of an article that doesn't exist? —Мандичка YO 😜 07:03, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * The German Wikipedia has an extensive page on Rachel Dolezal. Would be interesting if a U.S.-person gets deleted on the English Wikipedia, yet the German version stays, as it probably will.  I recommend the Rachel Dolezal page not be deleted XavierItzm (talk) 05:59, 13 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Strongly disagree. The topic is discussed worldwide by now (e.g. in Poland), gives rise to numerous memes (e.g. "if somebody feels Transnegro, let them claim to be Transnegro"), and contributes to healthy discussions about race, truth and political corectness. Zezen (talk) 06:42, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Disagree and recommend Keep.  Heyyouoverthere (talk) 06:57, 13 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. I wouln't go so far as to say that de.Wiki has an 'extensive' article becaues that would imply, within the context, that the article covers more than the English one, which it does not. It's probably true to say that based on these Wikipedia articles, she appears to be notable for one event only but a quick search reveals that there may be plenty of other reasons why she may just scrape through notability for en.Wiki.However, the burden is not on me to expand the article or provide additional sources. Perhaps would care to comment. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:56, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep - she's been in the local news for quite some time. It is entirely because she is a "public figure" that she got exposed as a fraud. —Мандичка YO 😜 07:01, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep - She has been in the news since at least 2009. She is a public person.  Agree with Мандичка.  XavierItzm (talk) 07:07, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

If I can add something to this discussion, I would recommend that the article not be deleted for the following reasons:

1) Irrespective of Rachel's race or ethnicity, she has nevertheless done some work for civil rights, and that needs to be acknowledged;

2) We do not as yet have all the facts as to whether Rachel has engaged in deception. Whilst the parents' video is apparently strong evidence, it still isn't documented confirmation, and there is some sort of dispute between Rachel and the parents.

3) The definitions of "race" and "ethnicity" are being debated at the moment in all of social networking and media, and it is not a simplistic answer. Rachel may genuinely "feel closer" to the African Americans, and it is not unheard of for people to feel like they identify with a culture/ethnicity that differs from the family that raised them.

Just to be clear, I am actually playing devil's advocate here. I have a very low tolerance to public deception, but for the sake of the integrity of this page and Wikipedia, I think we need to act prudently before making any decisions regarding the edit/deletion of this page.

Snifferdogx (talk) 07:09, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Just to be clear, the current controversy this person is involved in isn't about whether Johnny Otis identified with black culture, but whether Rachel Dolezal claimed to have black parents. Her (white) parents dispute this; there's no social-justice mushiness to be had. 209.211.131.181 (talk) 07:12, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Can you please provide a reference to where she specifically and explicitly stated that she had black parents? Snifferdogx (talk) 08:30, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * , she claimed her real father was black and her stepfather was white. She posted photos on Facebook of herself with an older black man and said it was her father. (Article about him). The reporter in the interview showed her one of the photos she posted and said "Is this your father?" and she said yes. In this article here that she wrote, she also repeatedly refers to herself as being a black woman. She does not say "I am a black woman" but the entire article is about black women and as you can see, she keeps saying "we" and "our" to include herself.  —Мандичка YO 😜 09:44, 13 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Cool, thank you! �Snifferdogx (talk) 11:41, 13 June 2015 (UTC)�


 * Delete. Not only does this article violate WP:BLP1E - prior coverage was all localized and is only being reexamined in light of the present nonsense - but the present article is close to implying things about her previous hate crimes complaints that are not supported by reliable sources; e.g., that she made them up. That I myself believe this is likely doesn't make the article less of a problem; that's why there's a policy about people known only for one negative thing. Also note that having her article listed in one Wikipedia surname article does not make her more notable. 209.211.131.181 (talk) 07:09, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment - This article does NOT violate WP:BLP1E, which states, "WP:BLP1E should be applied only to biographies of living people and to biographies of low-profile individuals." She is not a "low-profile individual." Please read what that means. —Мандичка YO 😜 07:12, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Keep - she is now the poster girl for the term transracial. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ftw 420 (talk • contribs) 07:27, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Keep - If we use the criterion "this person is, outside of a single event, non-notable" we also delete the page on Lee Harvey Oswald? Ewen (talk) 07:36, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Oswald was the subject of a critical biography warning about the dangers posed by radicals training in the US military, several years before he shot Kennedy (yes, really). Also, of course, he is not remotely a currently living person. Different standards are diferent. 209.211.131.181 (talk) 07:41, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * She has been in the news for several years, since at least 2009. She was also in the New York Times in 2010.  I think this negates your argument. XavierItzm (talk) 08:42, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Mark David Chapman then. The specific example is not relevant to what I'm saying. Is the situation significant? Yes, I think so. It may die a death but the issue of 'transracial' individuals has been put on the map. Ewen (talk) 07:55, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Keep as per the various arguments put forward by Мандичка. Jeremy112233 ( Lettuce-jibber-jabber? ) 07:50, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Speedie Keep she's a borderline low-profile, but this isn't one event, so even if BLP1E does apply, WP:IAR would keep this due to the wider global societal issues. We can't even merge to transracial as a poster girl due to lacking self-identity. Widefox ; talk 09:16, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Merge into and re-direct to Racial transformation (individual) Passing (racial identity). Subject is known only for short-term news coverage for this issue and does not have independent notability.--Rpclod (talk) 12:36, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Problem is she hasn't undergone a racial transformation. Did you mean Passing (racial identity)? -- haminoon  ( talk ) 12:39, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * You are correct. I was returning to edit my response and noticed you were quicker than me.  Need more coffee.--Rpclod (talk) 12:49, 13 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep She was regionally notable for her artistry and civil rights work prior to the current national attention to her race. See this pre 2015 Google search for references.  Her notability included being featured on a local magazine cover as a woman leader in the field of nonprofits. --Nowa (talk) 14:26, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep Rachel Dolezal search on google yields 2,200,000 hits. cnn, the guardian, washington post, nytimes, bbc, etc. Deleting it would be a new low in deletionist censorship. --BoogaLouie (talk) 14:41, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep, because 1) she seems to be a well established activist for African Americans' rights with a several-year long track record as a public figure (at both the regional and local level, in the context of a fairly large city), and 2) because of an enormous amount of coverage of her in the media all over the world. Tadeusz Nowak (talk) 17:03, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep: She is in the news now because she already got in the news for apparently contentious allegations regarding her family life. Those generated news coverage first. However, they only got news coverage because she had attained notability in the Pacific Northwest, and they seemed shocking. So, even though she's definitely the flavor of the week for bloggers and talk radio, she had a good bit of stuff on her before the most recent revelations. Hithladaeus (talk) 17:06, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep: Dolezal's story has sparked broader discussions around the issues of race and racial identity, including discussions around the means by which an individual identifies with a given community.Desmond Ravenstone (talk) 17:38, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep. Rachel Dolezal is prominent in the black civil rights community of Spokane, WA/Northern Idaho. She is the president of a NAACP chapter. (The Spokesman-Review has called her "one of the Inland Northwest’s most prominent civil rights activists".)12.180.133.18 (talk) 17:56, 13 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep — WP:BLP1E has 3 clearly defined criteria to be met if you want to use it to justify deletion, and this article fails all three: She was covered before this event, she is not likely to remain low profile outside this event, and her role in the one event is substantial. BLP1E is still deeply misunderstood. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:10, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * While the 1E has certainly made her more nationally and internationally famous than she was three or four days ago, I'm not at all sure that it's the entire crux of her encyclopedic notability — I can certainly see the potential that she would have already qualified for an article before the firestorm hit. That said, the sourcing here is very disproportionately weighted toward stuff published within the past week — while I do see a couple of sources that predate the 1E, I don't see enough of them to suggest that she would have passed WP:GNG before this week. Which means that the article, as written, is not adequately demonstrating that she escapes WP:BLP1E, because the weight of sourcing is piled almost entirely onto the 1E. Accordingly, I'm willing to revisit this if enough older sources can be added to demonstrate that she was already garnering enough coverage to meet GNG before this week — but in its existing state, this is still written and sourced as a BLP1E. Delete unless a lot more older referencing shows up. Bearcat (talk) 18:26, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * AfD deletion discussions are not about the article as written; they are only about how it could be written. How it is written and sourced is surmountable, a problem outside the scope of AfD. The fact that older sources exist is enoguh reason to keep. I count 34 news articles about the subject at HighBeam, all before the current controversy hit the news. The problem of getting those sources into the article is irrelevant to deletion; 'deletion is not cleanup'. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:08, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Except that without HighBeam access, I'm left with a 1980s-present database of Canadian newspapers (which, trust me, never wrote so much as a punctuation mark about her before this week), and a historical database of US newspapers that offers nothing published in the 2010s (and thus features no coverage of her either) — leaving me with no way to verify anything for myself except what's in the article as written. And at the time of my comment, people had simply asserted that older sourcing existed without actually showing any concrete proof of that. You're right that it doesn't all have to be in the article already — but editors still have to do more than just assert that such coverage exists, because that's a thing people can and do lie about. Which is why I left open the possibility of keeping it if someone provided some actual evidence of older sourcing — but I have to see concrete evidence that such sourcing does exist before I can factor it into my reasoning for anything. I still, for example, have no way of knowing how many of your 34 HighBeam hits are actually substantive coverage of her as a person, and how many really just provide a glancing namecheck of her existence (a type of hit which does not contribute to getting her over GNG). Bearcat (talk) 21:56, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
 * One of the points of the core principal WP:AGF is that when an editor asserts that they've verified a fact in a source, other editors are supposed to accept it. You don't simply say, "No, that's not online for me, so it doesn't count!" WP:OFFLINE is critical here: if we didn't rely on the vast quantity of sources that aren't online, at any price, the whole project would be badly biased in favor of recently-published sources, and sources associated with relatively high-tech archives. The number of books, periodicals and records nobody has digitized is staggering. And HighBeam isn't even offline; I got access through Wikipedia and you can too; it's there for the asking. Or you can request access and/or have someone check for you by proxy via WikiProject Resource Exchange. It is acceptable for editors to "simply assert" that sources exist. The burden then shifts back to those who would challenge the sources to do the footwork (which Wikipedia's resources make quite trivial) to re-verify if they still don't believe it. And we're not talking about extraordinary claims here: NAACP leaders are public figures, after all, and they are often at the center of news events, and academics do get published. If you won't do that footwork then you should accept the sources AGF, and not !vote delete. We can't delete articles based on the least-connected, poorest-library-access editor. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 00:08, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * No, it is not acceptable for editors to simply assert that sources exist — whether they're added to the article or listed in the AFD discussion, the onus is on the asserter to show their work, and not on anybody else to simply take anybody's word for it. And I don't need to have WP:OFFLINE explained to me, either — I turn to offline and database sources for my work all the time, so I was already under no illusion that our sources had to be instantly web acessible. Bearcat (talk) 00:29, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man. But WP:PAPERONLY says "If an editor seeking deletion believes the creator placed fictitious references in the article to make a hoax seem legitimate, the burden of proof is on the one seeking deletion." The WP:V policy says, "Do not reject sources just because they are hard or costly to access." So you're free to disagree with core Wikipedia policies which enjoy widespread support, but don't be shocked if your opinions are ignored by those who decide to go along with the policies and guidelines. If you think I'm lying that there are 34+ (I was conservative and didn't count every hit) substantial, pre-scandal news articles about Dolezal at HighBeam, the burden is now on you to go to Higbeam (easy) and show evidence that there aren't. Not counting the hits at Questia, ProQuest, Google News and Books, etc. This is such an easy keep. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 00:38, 14 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. Not a "low profile individual" so BLP1E does not appear to apply here. Besides, it's not even one "event". It's now emerging that doubts about her race pre-date her parents' interview. See here.--Pawnkingthree (talk) 19:22, 13 June 2015 (UTC).
 * Strongly advise KEEP, this is a worldwide news story.
 * See WP:NOTNEWS. Temporary newsiness has no bearing on whether a person is appropriate for inclusion in an encyclopedia or not. Bearcat (talk) 20:59, 13 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. She's the head of a NAACP chapter and has become prominent and covered by many sources. I suspect that people who want to delete this article are not comfortable with the conversation on racial identity she has spawned.  Now this may be a flash in the pan, but I doubt it.73.194.148.15 (talk) 00:11, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep. Homer Plessy is notable for a single train ride and the fallout from it. No one is seriously discussing deleting him, I trust. Sometimes, one issue is all it takes for a person to become important.  the ramifications of this issue are potentially considerable. Hard to believe the question is even being considered at this point in time.  Who's got the crystal ball?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.183.150.57 (talk) 01:58, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Idaho-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:28, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Washington-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:28, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:28, 14 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep per above SOXROX (talk) 04:11, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep per Dennis Bratland; may have borderline notability outside of this. But it also occurs to me that maybe there's a larger article to be written about the unusual phenomenon of white people pretending to be black in the same way as she did. Daniel Case (talk) 04:50, 14 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. Coverage in German major dailies, e.g. a large article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, refering to a showcase for social passing and stating a nationwide debate in the US. It might be a one-event-celebrity, but is a noteable one. Serten Talk 07:50, 14 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. She is Transracial. She is very brave and should be on the cover of Vanity Fair. --Andhisteam (talk) 11:22, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep. Rachel Dolezal's story has received international news coverage. Such extensive coverage in itself constitutes notability. -- Evans1982 (talk) 13:19, 14 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. This article doesn't fail the WP:BLP1E test, as she is not only being covered in numerous examples of WP:RS, but she is also head of a NAACP chapter, and is also a highly regarded civil rights activists, although mostly local in scope to Spokane. However, just because it's local, doesn't mean she's non-notable.  In fact, several essays regarding issues with wikipedia make mention of a lack of local content. 108.183.118.98 (talk) 14:47, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep - Extensive coverage in RS, no question of notability here. Fyddlestix (talk) 16:10, 14 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep per all of the cogent "keep" reasonings above. This is not a case of WP:1E.  The story now surrounding this woman has many aspects to it and I'm certain many more will be added as the story develops. -- WV ● ✉ ✓  18:46, 14 June 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.