Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Windsor municipal election, 1991


 * 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  k eep. - Mailer Diablo 02:48, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Windsor municipal election, 1991

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Two issues to deal with here. I can't see that election results for local council elections are encyclopedic enough to support their own articles. Also, these articles (there are more which I will deal with based on the result of this AfD) are being used to provide potted bios of NN candidates. So, leave as they are, delete the potted bios, or delete completely?  Eliminator JR Talk  00:25, 17 May 2007 (UTC) Finally, please judge an article on its contents, not just because someone may add crap to it at some point in the future. This article doesn't contain crap, so don't treat it as if it did. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:25, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Some comments
 * 1) There are probably thousands of these local election results articles, internationally. In particular, for developing countries it may be extremely difficult and time-consuming to determine significance/notability/regionality of a given election.
 * 2) From WP:N A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject and each other. This seems to me to justify to greater number (if not the overwhelming majority) of local election results.
 * 3) As for the potted bios - WP:N only deals with inclusion of articles, not with their content . The potted bios probably best come under WP:TRIVIA but not very satisfactorily.
 * 4) It might be better to debate this on policy talk pages rather than in AFD. CIreland 00:43, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you, CIreland, for your comments. Assuming that the afd moves forward, my preference is to keep the page.  I would also argue that the "potted bios" are innocuous, and may be beneficial to those interested in the subject matter.  CJCurrie 01:37, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak keep I'm not sold on the idea that municipal elections (as opposed to "local councils", whatever those are - counties? Rural areas? Surely not cities) are by definition notable, but this article is attributed to multiple independent reliable sources, so it passes WP:ATT and WP:N. -- Charlene 03:26, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep per CIreland. This is actually the perfect place for these potted bios, as for the most part, the candidates have no notaiblity independent of this election. Resolute 04:00, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * In which case the argument would be that they don't have any notability at all, and their details shouldn't be here. The other problem with having bios in articles about other subjects is that it makes WP:BLP very difficult.  Eliminator JR  Talk  09:15, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, this event clearly received press coverage, and I'd welcome as many articles about elections as we can find sources (beyond mere results tallies) to support. The numerous cited newspaper articles clearly qualify as sufficient to make this a valid subject. Whether to remove the biographies is something to be worked out among editors on the talk page, not at AfD. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 05:37, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment. I agree with CIreland's second point and Charlene's comment. I'm not saying there should be these types of articles or that they would ever be good articles, but current guidelines do allow for them. For interest's sake there is Articles on elections. --maclean 05:53, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete, individual pages for elections in each and every municipality in the world is faaaaaar over the top. Punkmorten 06:36, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep. Obscurity of a subject is certainly no reason for deletion. The details on this page are both citable (not original research) and of interest to people studying the field of relevance. Personally, in my own studies, I would love to have a rich collection of municipal election articles dating back as far as possible. To be able to trace the history of local elections and try to discern patterns or trends would be very relevant to my work. I also include in that study the details of otherwise non-notable candidates. Seeing who is running (including unsuccessfully) is a critically important detail when studying elections. —GrantNeufeld 07:07, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Transwiki. WP:PLOT 9, WP:NOT 3. Wikisource is a better place for this. If the article gave more encyclopedic background, eg, controversies during the election, major campaigning points, etc, it might be worth keeping here. --bd_ 07:17, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong delete, this is an article about elections for people who fail WP:BIO, that is, fall short of the state/provincial division standard (however ridiculous that may be in comparing The Comoros to China). As Windsor is a substantial city I'm OK with their mayor having an article per "attention in the media" politician loopholes, but not councillors, so an article on the election is very dubious. Wikipedia is not a gazetteer or directory. Particularly since local political articles tend to attract less rigorous editing and vandalism oversight, I feel these will be a magnet for potential WP:BLP violations -- I shudder to think of the crap that could be written just for the last couple of city council elections in my city. --Dhartung | Talk 07:32, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Reply. Wikipedia is not a gazetteer or directory does not apply, because this is not simply a list, it is an article about an election, covering people and voting. WP:BIO covers articles on individuals, so clearly does not apply here (insofar as this article is about people, it is about a group of people, which is a different issue). This in article primarily about a defining process in the council, and it is really stretching a point to say that including a few brief notes about the candidates somehow turns the article into a biography: if any article including brief mentions of several people was assessed solely as a biography, we'd have to delete thousands of useful and important articles on sport, culture and politics.

Per Cleland, there is a broader policy issue here, because this AfD is clearly being used to set a precedent: public bodies have a wide range of powers and significance, so it is very hard to set an objective threshold for inclusion. Do we include only nationwide elections? I so, we lose elections to state legislatures in the United States. So maybe we decide to include them ... but if we include state elections in Delaware (pop 843,000), it would be bizarre to exclude elections to the City Council in Birmingham, England (pop 1.1million). If someone want to create a guideline on which elections are notable, then open discussions on such a guideline, but don't do it on an ad-hoc basis, and don't compare the readily-verifiable election results of a major city with those of a place where verifiability is problematic. If there are any improperly-sourced articles, deal with them by WP:RS, not by trying to eliminate articles which are well-sourced. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:25, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong keep municipal councils are inherently notable to people in the area concerned and to people who are interested in learning about that area. Wikpedia is not paper. The potted bios add to the article, especially as they are concise and NPOV. If they were lengthy or promotional, I would agree that they should be deleted, but they are not. Ground Zero | t 10:01, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong keep. Elections to public office clearly meet the WP:N test of being covered by two or more reliable sources; and if people want further reasons beyond WP:N, then consider that elections are one of the defining aspects of any democratic system. My only regret about this article   is that there are not more articles on elections.  For goodness sake, when we have zillions of articles on video games and the characters therein, and plenty of precedent for keeping them, why on earth is an election in a major city not  an obvious keep?
 * Comment Whether it's sourced or not isn't the issue, it's whether it meets our guidelines (WP:NOT). Is it notable who the mayor is?  Yes, of course.  Is it really notable how many votes he/she got?  In every local election in history?  Probably not, I'd say. Apart from the mayor, you've got an election between (usually) non-notable people.  That doesn't sound encyclopedic to me.  Furthermore, User:CJCurrie has majorly expanded this article since it started, with even more statistics, not to mention canvassing other editors on their talk pages.  Eliminator JR  Talk  11:18, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * You're correct to note that I expanded the page after the afd was started. My reasons were quite simple: (i) the page was an incomplete stub, and should have been been expanded some time ago, (ii) if this is going to be a test-case afd, we might as well indicate the page's full potential.  For the record, I contacted three other editors on their talk pages: one has voted to keep, one cast a neutral vote, and the third hasn't contributed to the discussion.  CJCurrie 16:11, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, the expansion comment wasn't actually a criticism as some of the information you added is actually more notable than what was already there, though some wasn't. I don't believe this is a test case, btw: more a measure of how we should approach the recording of election results on Wikipedia; there will always be exceptions.  Eliminator JR Talk  17:25, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment Eliminator, your comment that "apart from the mayor, you've got an election between (usually) non-notable people" misunderstands what a city council election is about. A general election at any level (as opposed to a by-election) is not just a contest between individuals, it is a collective choice about the political priorities and direction of the city as a whole. Even if each of the individual councillors are individually non-notable, their collective election is much more notable than the sum of the parts. For example, an election which replaces a socialist-dominated council with a conservative-dominated council (or vice versa) marks a significant change of course in the running of a city. None of the defeated councillors and none of their replacements may be particularly interesting of themselves, but since their powers are exercised collectively, their collective significance is much greater. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:02, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep While I can understand that having too many articles can make things hard to find, documenting the issues and opinions expressed in elections in Local Governments can be quite useful. An encyclopeadia is often a starting point, and so being able to find that ""joe Blow"" ran for 5 consectutive times and lost may allow the reader a starting point to look for other sources in their own learning process.cmacd 16:07, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * But you can't find out that information from these articles without trawling through every single one...  Eliminator JR Talk  17:27, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep! Elections are very notable, and we've had afd debates over smaller communities, and they have been to keep. I just wish CJCurrie would actually finish all of these election pages ;-) -- Earl Andrew - talk 16:42, 17 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete Since notability has no expiration date, and since every election is reported in the local newspapers, then if we keep such as this we would have to keep an article on every election in history in every town and village, as well as every issue in the election, such as resolutions and bond issues, which also get reported in multiple newspapers. Much of this info is a miscellaneous collection of information. We are not a gazette, and do not have to repeat everything which was ever published in multiple newspapers. Edison 17:03, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * If extensive coverage in multiple nontrivial sources isn't sufficient, what is? We're not paper, we don't need to worry about having thousands of articles on any particular topic. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 17:51, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment Note that there are millions of towns in the world which have had elections for a hundred years or more reported in muliiple local and regional papers. Too trivial to be in an encyclopedia. I could create 100 such articles for small towns with newspaper microfilms but it would be too WP:POINTy. "We are not paper" is a poor excuse for limitless articles of no importance or use. Think of the number of stub articles if someone even stuck to elections for state assembly and nation office, by district.  for instance lists local votes from the states and counties from the 1780's through the 1820's. Each of these local elections was certainly written up in state and local papers, but what purpose is served by importing the data from such an external archive of election results into Wikipedia? Whyt attempt to mirror all information there is rather than just linking to it? More articles means more potential for accidental error or vandalism as well, and more things to occupy space on the watchlists of editors.Edison 17:08, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment More articles means more potential for accidental error or vandalism as well? What sort of argument is that, except an argument for deleting huge 95% of Wikipedia to retain only those articles which are important to everyone? Similarly, we are not discussing a small town, we are discussing a major city. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:46, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep Elections are inherently notable as has been stated above. As long as they are sourced, as we are not a paper encyclopedia, they should be kept. Davewild 20:11, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. Elections usually have some stories which would keep this kind of article from being as dull as it currently is. A few paragraphs of narrative about the election issues and events would be nice. Keeping due weight in mind, we should emphasize the final results and the major news stories, and not give undue publicity to people who didn't get much attention. Kla'quot 06:55, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment Looking at other municipal elections, I found another method of doing this (also from Canada). Instead of having one page for each year's election complete with irrelevant stats and bios, have one page for each electoral district, with a history of its elections - have a look here Beaches—East York (I know this isn't a municipal district, but the concept's the same).  This is a much better way of doing this, I think - all the Windsor Municipal election pages could be condensed into one far more encyclopedic article.  Eliminator JR  Talk  09:27, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Question. So, like a "Ward One (Windsor)" article? But all those provincial & federal electoral districts are are collected into general election articles like Ontario general election, 1995, which is equivalent to Windsor municipal election, 1991. If there are going to be articles on municipal elections I prefer one general election article. Other options could be one article per province like British Columbia municipal elections, 2005, where all elections occur in the same year, though I'd make exceptions for large cities like Toronto (Windsor would be cutting it close);   or one article for each municipality like Windsor City Council or Government and politics of Vancouver. --maclean 17:22, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep per CIreland. GreenJoe 22:18, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, notable. Everyking 06:26, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I certainly wouldn't support having an article for every individual city councillor, or for every election in a town of 10 people, but municipal elections in one of Canada's 20 largest cities are suitably encyclopedic. Sure, they'd never get into Britannica, but that's why WP:PAPER exists. We do have articles on plenty of other major cities' municipal elections — if we'd like to decide against them as a general policy, I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to that, but in the meantime as long as they're currently permitted there's no good reason to single Windsor's out as uniquely non-notable. (And no, this is not an WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument; it's more like "let's actually hash out a policy on whether we want these as a general rule or not".) And it's precisely because past municipal elections aren't well-documented on the web that there is value in having somebody put the work in to find the appropriate references and documentation. Keep. Bearcat 17:12, 19 May 2007 (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.