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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 soft delete. WP:REFUND applies. So Why 14:54, 5 September 2017 (UTC) reply

Joe Herzenberg

Joe Herzenberg (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)
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Biography of an academic and politician, whose most substantive claim of notability is that his election to a smalltown city council in 1987 made him the first openly gay elected official in his state. We do not, however, automatically accept everybody as notable who can merely claim to have been the first member of an underrepresented minority group to hold an otherwise non-notable political office -- it would count for something if he could be shown to clear WP:GNG off the media coverage he received for the fact, but it's not an automatic inclusion freebie that exempts him from having to be reliably sourced. Of the three sources being cited here, however, one is an unpublished private e-mail from his sister and the other two are his contributor profiles in the back matter of an academic journal. And while there's a linkfarm of other "sources" present in the external links section, most of those are blogs rather than reliable sources -- the only one that even starts to build a case for GNG is an obituary in the local newspaper. But it's a deadlink, and obituaries of local figures would be routinely expected to exist in the local newspaper, so that source doesn't make him pass GNG all by itself. All of which means there just isn't enough valid sourcing here to make him notable. (Also there's a probable conflict of interest here, as the creator's username corresponds to the name of one of Herzenberg's council colleagues.) Bearcat ( talk) 15:10, 28 August 2017 (UTC) reply

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bearcat ( talk) 15:11, 28 August 2017 (UTC) reply
Note: This debate has been included in the list of North Carolina-related deletion discussions. Bearcat ( talk) 15:11, 28 August 2017 (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.