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. Per clear consensus. (non-admin closure) ミラ P 15:30, 30 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Jim Rogers (California politician) (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)

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Local politician, doesn't pass WP:NPOL, and does not appear to pass WP:GNG. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 12:59, 23 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 12:59, 23 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 12:59, 23 December 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep this guy is very famous in the San Francisco Bay Area, for years he had infomercials for the People's Lawyer and he even has NY Times coverage. One guy is mass nominating Richmond, California articles for deletion. Ndołkah ( talk) 13:16, 23 December 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete under normal circumstances a city council for a city the size of Richmond, that is not even one of the 3 largest and most important cities in its urban area would have no notable members. Local media promotion does not translate into notability. John Pack Lambert ( talk) 20:05, 23 December 2019 (UTC) reply
• comment it does translate into notability though, no? Ndołkah ( talk) 00:53, 24 December 2019 (UTC) reply

  Not if all you show is two hits in the local media, no. To be wikinotable for being a city councillor, his coverage would have to nationalize far beyond just the Bay Area. Bearcat ( talk) 17:13, 24 December 2019 (UTC) reply

  No it does not it just must meet the GNG, local sources and regional sources ARE reliable sources notwithstanding! Ndołkah☆ ( talk) 07:03, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

  Bearcat, I have a lot of respect for your work to delete articles about non-notable politicians and often agree with you. But your comment that "his coverage would have to nationalize far beyond just the Bay Area" is not based on any policy, guideline or established consensus. The San Francisco Bay Area region has nine million people, more than 38 U.S. states, and significant coverage of Rogers in respected, award winning regional newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News is perfectly adequate to establish notability. The vast majority of local politicians do not receive such significant coverage in major regional newspapers Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 07:19, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

  Every city councillor in every city can always show as much local coverage as this shows — if this is enough coverage to make Jim Rogers more notable than most other city councillors, then every city councillor is always more notable than most other city councillors and the entire concept of NPOL is automatically rendered completely meaningless because nobody in politics can ever fail it anymore. The notability test for a city councillor is not just "local coverage exists in the local media", because every city councillor can always show that — it is "he has a credible claim to being much more nationally significant than the norm for this level of political office", and that test is not automatically passed just because his city happens to be a suburb of a larger media market whose main local newspaper is more famous than other cities' local newspapers. Richmond, in and of itself, is smaller than the city I grew up in — so its city councillors are not more special than the city councillors in my hometown just because Richmond happens to be a suburb of an even larger city whose local media is more famous than my hometown's local media. If Rogers clears the bar on the sourcing shown here, then every city councillor in existence automatically also clears the bar. Bearcat ( talk) 08:04, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

  Bearcat, you are factually wrong if you assert that every city council member in every medium size city gets coverage in major newspapers like the 20 paragraph article about Rogers in the Mercury News. Nobody in Northern California calls Richmond a "suburb" of anything, certainly not San Jose. Richmond is a working class port city with a long history of shipbuilding and automobile manufacturing. It is definitely not a "suburb". Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 20:44, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Let's be clear here, the standard is "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list." so he has gotten significant coverage in reliable sources. That is a cut and paste from the GNG that you mentioned. And your assessment does not support what the GNG says and is Original Research at worst, overzealous dissent at best I would say. Furthermore POL states, "People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject." 18 is multiple and in secondary sources, including several in depth. The various newspapers are intellectually independent of each other and of Jim Rogers. Furthermore OTHERSTUFF applies here "Delete We do not have an article on y, so we should not have an article on this." This article stands by itself, we this discussion does not decide if other stuff should exist or not, the fact that there are millions of other articles that could be created on other councilors is not under consideration here. They would have to stand on their own merits. It's too bad your hometown doesn't have coverage as great as Richmond, maybe Richmond is better for it maybe not but tell me what city is that? I would love to create an article on another city council. Ndołkah☆ ( talk) 08:22, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Let's be clear here: if the only notability test that people actually had to pass was that some local coverage exists in their local media, and the existence of such purely local coverage handed them an automatic GNG pass that exempted them from having to actually clear the defined notability criteria for their occupation, then we would have to keep an article about every city councillor in every city on earth; every school board trustee in every city on earth; everybody who ever opened a local restaurant or boutique; everybody who ever won a high school poetry contest or battle of the bands competition; every president of an elementary school parent teacher association or a condo board; every teenager who ever had two pieces of human interest coverage written about his battle against a health challenge; every high school athlete; my mother's neighbour who got into the local papers a few years ago for finding a pig in her front yard; every murder victim on earth; and me. In other words, if we do that, we're not an encyclopedia anymore — we're just a worthless LinkedIn clone.

Which is precisely why, as I previously pointed out and was correct about, GNG is not just "count up the footnotes and keep anything that surpasses an arbitrary number". GNG also takes into account the depth of the coverage, the geographic range of the coverage, and the context of what the person is getting coverage for, and assigns much less value to localized coverage than it does to nationalized coverage. A person does not automatically get into Wikipedia on GNG grounds just because some local coverage exists in local-interest contexts: their coverage has to demonstrate a nationalized profile for reasons of nationalized significance before it counts as notability-making coverage under GNG. Bearcat ( talk) 08:51, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Your just not citing policy and everything else is irrelevant here. The GNG is all that matters here. Where in policy does it state that you must have national coverage? Ndołkah☆ ( talk) 08:58, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Please read WP:ONLYESSAY: specifically, the part about how we have "policies" to tell us what to do, and guidelines to tell us how to do it. "Policy" is not the sum total of all the rules we apply and follow — policy, in fact, is only for the most very general statements of broad principle, while most of our rules are actually communicated and covered by things called guidelines and actual practice rather than by "policies". Policy is for base things like "don't attack other editors" and "don't make unsourced allegations of criminality against our article subjects", not for article structure matters. So it's not sufficient to say that "because I can't find a policy that confirms what you're saying, that means you're wrong and I don't have to follow it" — you also have to be familiar with the consensus agreement about how policies are understood to apply when conflicting interpretations of them have come up for discussion and debate. One of those agreements is that the existence of a handful of local coverage in a person's local media, in local interest contexts that do not clear the defined inclusion standards for the person's occupation, is not in and of itself a GNG-based exemption from those inclusion standards — as I already pointed out, every city councillor on the planet can always show the existence of some local coverage. But Wikipedia has an established consensus that not every city councillor warrants an article, so the key to making a city councillor notable enough for inclusion is to show that he's significantly more notable than most other city councillors, not just that he has the same thing that every other city councillor in existence also has. It doesn't matter one pinch of bird shit whether that's officially spelled out in policy or not — if thousands of other AFDs on city councillors who could only show routine local coverage, but had no credible claim to being special at all, said so, which they did, then that established consensus is every bit as binding as any policy statement. "If it isn't officially branded as policy, then it isn't a real rule" is not a thing — we have lots of rules that aren't formally coded as policy, but are still real rules that still have to be followed. Bearcat ( talk) 23:24, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

• Calm down and stop cussing at me now. You still are not citing policy only your opinion - which makes your argument weak and moot. Ndołkah☆ ( talk) 02:29, 30 December 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete Keep, article was a complete hatchet job and presumably created for that reason. I have redacted as required per WP:BLP, please do not restore per WP:BLP, instead take the issue to the article talk page. Removing the BLP violation deleted whatever notability he might have had, so delete for lack of notability. Herostratus ( talk) 15:12, 24 December 2019 (UTC) -- Changed my vote to "Keep" based on new material, see comment below. reply
• Delete. Richmond CA is not large enough to hand all of its city councillors guaranteed inclusion rights just because they exist — to be notable enough for inclusion, Jim Rogers would have to show either (a) preexisting notability for other reasons that would already have gotten him into Wikipedia anyway, or (b) that his depth and range of coverage had expanded far beyond the norm, to the point that he had a credible claim to being much more special than most other city councillors. But neither of those things are in evidence here, and I've already explained above why "he has some coverage in his own city's local media" is not in and of itself a GNG-based exemption from having to pass NPOL. No city councillor in any city ever doesn't have that. Bearcat ( talk) 17:13, 24 December 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete. Rogers is a non-notable local politician, which causes him not to meet the WP:GNG & WP:POLITCIAN stipulations. Lefcentreright Talk (plz ping) 21:10, 24 December 2019 (UTC) reply

  He does meet the GNG as per the sources now in the article. Ndołkah☆ ( talk) 05:13, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep. (Changed my vote) The article has been significantly improved and saved by Ndołkah. It now meets WP:GNG and WP:NPOL. Lefcentreright Talk (plz ping) 07:44, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply
• Request for more time I have expanded the article and found many more sources, I feel more strongly now that it does meet the GNG after the other sources that may have violated BLP had been removed. Ndołkah☆ ( talk) 04:17, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply
• Comment. Well... there is a lot of new material and refs, and the negative material has been scrubbed. The East Bay Other did call him "the Bay Area's most famous TV lawyer". The San Franciso Chronicle has an entire article on him, and there are 18 other refs. There's no reason to delete the article now and it would be unusual to delete an article that so easily meets WP:BIO.

That said, the refs themselves have bad things to say about him. Character assassination at one remove using this method is something we do see. It's possibly in play here, but in my judgement since he really is notabl in part for being involved in the (bad) activities described, it's OK, particularly since we ourselves aren't saying it. Consequently I've changed my "vote" (above) from Delete to Keep.

Also, since this is the first "vote" since the article was improved, the closer ought to heavily discount comments above here and mostly consider comments starting here. Herostratus ( talk) 06:04, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep. Rogers has three plausible claims of notability: as a high profile lawyer, as an elected Contra Costa County supervisor, and as a member of the Richmond, California city council. He is not a small town politician, as his county has a million residents and his city has a population of 110,000. Wikipedia currently has about 250 biographies of California county supervisors. The article has been dramatically improved in recent days. The 20 paragraph article about Rogers in the San Jose Mercury News published in 2014 after his electoral defeat is a strong indicator of his notability. San Jose is over 50 miles away from Richmond and it is unusual to devote such significant coverage to a defeated politician in a city so far away. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 06:10, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply
• Keep This article seems to have been saved by the good work of Ndolkah. They have found many good refs and greatly improved the article, and removed the offending BLP material. They ought be commended! Captain Eek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!} ⚓ 06:31, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply
• Keep per Cullen. There has been a great deal of work to improve the article after the original, BLP violating hatchet job was pushed into Wikipedia. Ravensfire ( talk) 20:36, 29 December 2019 (UTC) reply

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.