Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tamworth Council election, 2008


 * 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. Owen&times; &#9742;  13:29, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Tamworth Council election, 2008

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Does not seem to be notable enough for elections. Article is year specific for a local election. Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:11, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep (and same for all the Tamworth election pages). I typed 5 random towns of similar size into the search box, and 4 of them (Winchester, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Wolverhampton) had similar Wiki pages for elections, one page per year. I am not experienced enough to be certain whether UK local authority results are notable events (though the political governance of significant towns impacts on thousands over a period of years), but if Tamworth's data were deleted (or merged into a single election page), there would be a lot more pages that would also have to dealt with.Asnac (talk) 10:08, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * They may exist, but that doesn't mean they are notable. The list of common outcomes does not have any information regarding elections, just the candidates. Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:23, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * If we apply WP:EVENT it seems that local elections are not considered notable. PS: Is it possible to merge the discussion? Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:25, 8 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment. Right now could be merged to (Tamworth_local_elections), but that would not require the merger of everything, just the outcomes. The rest could safely be deleted. Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:32, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep There have been a number of AFD's of local elections in the United Kingdom and none of them have resulted in deletion. Examples include Articles for deletion/Kettering Council election, 2007, Articles for deletion/Birmingham Council election, 2008 and Articles for deletion/Stevenage Council election, 2003. We have always considered these elections as meeting the notability guidelines with sufficient coverage to write articles on them. Indeed I can point to articles such as Lichfield Council election, 1999, Redditch Council election, 2002 and Wyre Forest Council election, 2004 which have been on the front page. Consisentency requires we keep these or delete them all, otherwise we have a situation where one council is deleted and another similar one is kept. Multiple articles have been created on the most recent 2011 elections - see United Kingdom local elections, 2011 showing many editors agree we should have these articles. Davewild (talk) 10:59, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment Can these AFD's be merged - I am now going to copy the above comment through to the other years AFD's but it would make more sense to have one merged AFD for all the elections. Davewild (talk) 11:00, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Procedural Keep has 56 subcategories, all full of pages akin to this - local elections by year in varia boroughs, counties and councils. They survive notable and WP:ONEVENT because they are lists. The list of common outcomes for Politicians mentions campaign candidates and hopefuls who fail, and directs that if they are not notable for an article by themselves, then they go into a list of candidates for that election.  --Whiteguru (talk) 11:06, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep - election results should always be kept as long as they are verifiable. --Anthem of joy (talk) 11:20, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Procedural Keep for now, as per Asnac but, longer term, Crisco 1492 has a valid policy point - there doesn't appear to be a notability criterion for elections at the moment but, if and when one is drawn up, most English local authority elections might well be deemed too local for general notability, at least at this level of detail. However, Wikipedia has hundreds, possibly thousands, of these articles and, for elections even three or four years back, they are often the only publicly-available source of the information that I know of - the trouble is that detailed results are usually easy to source reliably at the time from the website of the relevant local authority or from local newspapers, but both suffer from link-rot and/or lack of reliable searchable long-term archives. And I seem to be far from the only person who finds the information occasionally useful, for as far back (and further than) Wikipedia has it and for local authorities all over Britain (and sometimes the world). So the points that need to be sorted are, firstly, what the notability guidelines should be and, secondly, what can be done, preferably in an orderly and reasonably uniform manner, towards preserving any information determined to be too local for them and free access to it, presumably off Wikipedia, and preferably with semi-standardised links from here (something like happens with IMDB?). But this is the kind of thing that is not going to be sortable in the single week of an AfD discussion. PWilkinson (talk) 11:45, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I will bring this up at the Village Pump. Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:14, 8 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I have expanded the article since the AFD was started adding some text and a map - see this diff showing the change here. I think the article now shows notability through significant coverage in reliable sources. Davewild (talk) 12:59, 8 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep - Nicely done political science about a local election. The election itself is clearly the subject of independent coverage. The compilation of election data is not regarded as the bad sort of "Original Research" banned by WP policy, nor should it be. The election may be limited in scope, but Wikipedia is not paper, after all, and there's no rational reason to limit the encyclopedia's scope by failing to use such admittedly esoteric historical work such as this. The page is a credit to Wikipedia, worthy of emulation. Carrite (talk) 15:15, 8 May 2011 (UTC) Since this is one of a series of like challenges, this will be copied-and-pasted where applicable.


 * Comment (More specific concerns) The problem is that elections have a couple problems (in my opinion). First, WP:EVENT (specifically WP:DIVERSE, WP:EFFECT, and WP:GEOSCOPE) seems to indicate that the only elections that pass notability are those with national coverage and significant, lasting, wide-area effects. Secondly, per my interpretation of WP:DIRECTORY articles that are just a list of who ran, who won, which seats, and so on are a violation of WP:NOT. Finally, [{WP:GNG]] states that ""Presumed" means that significant coverage in reliable sources establishes a presumption, not a guarantee, that a subject is suitable for inclusion. Editors may reach a consensus that although a topic meets this criterion, it is not appropriate for a stand-alone article;" it is possible that such elections may pass WP:LISTN but not be notable enough for a stand-alone article. Applied here, WP:EVENT seems to be unfulfilled, and (even after the rewrite) it seems to be more of a directory than an analysis. I am open to a merger of pertinent data, but still concerned. Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:18, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Firstly this article does have national level coverage - see references 1,2,5 and 7, references 3 and 6 are also regional and none of the sources are just local to Tamworth. There are no local election articles in England which do not at least have some coverage of the results on a national level. Secondly these elections almost always elect people to 4 year terms giving a lasting impact on the area. Thirdly the elections are discussed with the impact that local election results have nationally (so and so party did well here so could pick up the parliamentary seat etc). When WP:EVENT was being written supporters of the guideline assured an opponent that Pittsburgh mayoral election, 2009 would be ok if the guideline was accepted see Wikipedia talk:Notability (events)/Archive 2. Fourthly I fail to see how any of the items at WP apply to elections and wikipedia specifically includes "elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers" with elections being a topic for almanac. Fifthly if your interpretation of WP:DIRECTORY is accepted then we cannot have any election results such as Results by riding of the Canadian federal election, 2011, I do not accept such articles are directories. Finally yes WP:N says articles with significant coverage are presumed to be notable and I am glad you agree the article does have significant coverage. Previous AFDs have accepted this such as Articles for deletion/Kettering Council election, 2007, Articles for deletion/Birmingham Council election, 2008 and Articles for deletion/Stevenage Council election, 2003 showing there is definitely no consensus that the presumption that they are notable should be ignored. As seen by comments at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom editors in relevant wikiprojects discuss these articles without any argument they should be deleted (indeed there was a proposal back a while at a wikiproject that parish elections were ok to cover which I think goes too far). Apologies for the length of comment but I do not see why these articles should be deleted. (Others seem to agree, just while this AFD has been going another 2 articles have been started on English local elections - not by me). Davewild (talk) 07:32, 9 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep, but in the long run think about how local election results should be presented. The precedent that doesn't quite fit is that local authorities tend to cover roughly the same area as a Parliamentary constituency, but we don't have one article per constituency per election. The alternative would be to have one page per local authority call Elections to xxxx and put the individual ward results into something like Wikisource, but that's a decision that would have to be made across the board for all English (or even UK) local elections. To do this randomly depending on which pages happened to be nominated for AfD would be a mess. Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 08:35, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Just to say Wikisource itself would not accept election results, it is one of the specific items they exclude at the What is Wikisource page. Davewild (talk) 12:21, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Is there another project that accepts stuff like this, or would that require a new project? (If it is eventually decided that moving them from Wikipedia is desirable). Crisco 1492 (talk) 03:06, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
 * There is no wikimedia project other than the wikipedias that accepts election results and I do not know of any collaborative project outside of wikipedia that does either. Personally as you know I think they should stay on wikipeda:) and almost certainly would not support any project ouside of the wikimedia group. Davewild (talk) 06:41, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed I know where you stand on this :-). If we had some sort of directory service... perhaps just for elections and other things... But that's outside of my power. Crisco 1492 (talk) 08:20, 11 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment In the US we have a lot of elections. Here in California usually twice per year with perhaps 20 or thirty offices being voted for and maybe a dozen or so Propositions. These are all split at the county and city level so I might expect almost a thousand articles per year for California. So far as I know no-one has yet started to write these articles. But if they do these will outnumber council elections in the UK. It would be hard to argue that they are less notable than UK council elections. I think many people will argue that the US elections at this level of detail should not be included in Wikipedia and the UK council elections would be thrown out with the bathwater. I think people interested in preserving the UK information should seriously consider alternative places to use as a host. Dingo1729 (talk) 06:03, 15 May 2011 (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.