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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 keep. Lord Roem ~ ( talk) 01:09, 11 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Rob Parker (councillor)

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Contested PROD. Fails WP:NPOL: we don't usually consider leaders of councils to be notable. Fails WP:GNG. Bondegezou ( talk) 22:53, 3 December 2019 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Bondegezou ( talk) 22:53, 3 December 2019 (UTC) reply
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of England-related deletion discussions. Bondegezou ( talk) 22:53, 3 December 2019 (UTC) reply
  • Keep. I think there is definitely a very sensible argument for the leader of a county council to be considered notable. Lincolnshire has more than a million people. The mayor of a city with that population would definitely be considered notable. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 11:13, 4 December 2019 (UTC) reply
WP:POLOUTCOMES says: "Each case is evaluated on its own individual merits. Mayors of cities of at least regional prominence have usually survived AFD". That's not quite "definitely considered notable". And he's not a mayor of a city: he's the council leader of a county. While one can draw an analogy, I am not convinced how strong it is. Council leader is a somewhat different role to a mayor: it's a less significant role than mayors in many countries are. It's a less significant role than a UK elected mayor. Lincolnshire, I would have thought, had a population below a million when he was council leader: it's only just over a million today. Ultimately, the question is can we write a meaningful article about this person, rather than just a bare minimum statement of his electoral history and some WP:ROUTINE coverage of local politics? Bondegezou ( talk) 11:47, 4 December 2019 (UTC) reply
  • Comment My apologies: I should not have PROD'ed the article in the first place as I now realise it had survived a PROD some years before. I should've come straight to AfD. Bondegezou ( talk) 12:15, 4 December 2019 (UTC) reply
  • Delete. Leaders of county councils are not handed an automatic notability freebie just because they exist. The reason a mayor of a city with a million people would be considered notable isn't because of that million people's potential interest in reading about their own mayor — it's because the mayor of a city that large would be a topic of wide reader interest far beyond just his or her own city alone, in a way that a county councillor would not. (That is, the audience for an article about Sadiq Khan is not limited to residents of London — it's worldwide. Most local politicians can't claim the same, which is why we don't consider all local politicians to be "inherently" notable.) At the county level, the notability test is not just "local media coverage in his own county exists" — local media coverage always exists for every county councillor everywhere, so every county councillor would always be exempted from actually having to pass NPOL at all if the existence of some local coverage were all it took. Rather, at the county council level the notability test is the reception of nationalizing or internationalizing coverage, demonstrating a credible reason to consider him much more notable than the norm for that level of government — but nothing here shows that at all. Bearcat ( talk) 16:36, 4 December 2019 (UTC) reply
Why is there any distinction between national and local media coverage? What policy is that distinction explicitly stated in? It sounds arbitrary and in contravention of the principles behind WP:GNG. If, for instance, there are 20 reliable, independent sources discussing him at length, then surely that makes him worthy of passing WP:GNG, regardless of whether those sources are local newspapers; otherwise it just starts to sound like "I don't like it, therefore delete". Regardless of "presumed" or "inherent" notability under NPOL, GNG is all that matters and I'd argue he passes GNG as the article stands (I'm intending to add more over the next couple of days). — Noswall59 ( talk) 16:47, 4 December 2019 (UTC). reply
All local media everywhere always covers local politics; that's local media's job. So if purely local coverage were enough in and of itself to get a county councillor over GNG and thus exempt him from actually having to pass NPOL, then every county councillor on the entire planet would always get that pass, and NPOL would never apply to anybody at all anymore. And by the same token, bands could claim that they had passed GNG, and were therefore exempted from actually having to accomplish anything that would actually pass NMUSIC, if the existence of three or four articles about them in their local newspaper about them playing the local pub on Friday night were all it took to get them over GNG. Writers could claim that they had passed GNG, and were therefore exempted from actually having to accomplish anything that would actually pass AUTHOR, if the existence of a couple of articles in their local media about their winning a local poetry contest were all it took to get them over GNG. High school athletes could claim that they had passed GNG, and were therefore exempted from having to actually pass NATHLETE, if the existence of a couple of human interest pieces in their local media about their recovery from cancer were all it took to get them over GNG. And on and so forth — being able to show some purely local coverage in a person's own local media market is not always enough in and of itself to claim that they've passed GNG and therefore didn't have to actually satisfy the notability standards for their occupation, because local media cover lots of local interest topics that aren't of interest or relevance to an international encyclopedia at all.
GNG is not just "count up the media hits and keep anything that meets or exceeds two" — GNG does consider factors like the geographic range of how widely the topic is getting covered and the context of what the person is getting coverage for, and GNG does give some kinds of media coverage much less weight than other kinds. County council is not an "inherently" notable role — so the notability test that a county councillor has to pass to qualify for a Wikipedia article is that they're significantly more special than most other county councillors, by virtue of having received a depth and range and volume of coverage that goes significantly beyond just what every county councillor everywhere can always show. Bearcat ( talk) 17:21, 4 December 2019 (UTC) reply
You say that coverage has to be national or international to pass GNG but I actually don't see anywhere on that policy's page where it says that. I understand what you're saying — that any local politician that has significant coverage in local media will be notable if we accept local media as a source. I just don't understand (a) why that's a problem; (b) where Wikipedia's policies explicitly stand against that; or (c) why your definition of "international" has to preclude the "local" (for instance, one could argue an online encyclopedia has to be about "global" subjects like wars and the UN; one could also make the case that an online encyclopedia can also provide coverage of local matters to a global audience). We are meant to be "sum of all knowledge" after all.
I'm also not suggesting (a) that we simply count sources; or (b) that we allow anyone with routine coverage to be included. But I'm saying that when Parker and others like him are discussed at length over three decades of locally high-profile local government work, then we shouldn't simply discount the notability conferred by those sources because they're local. Cheers, — Noswall59 ( talk) 17:49, 4 December 2019 (UTC). reply
Indiscriminately maintaining an article about every local politician on earth is a problem for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it's unsustainable — we're not even doing a very good job of maintaining the quality of the articles we already have, let alone adding millions more by loosening or waiving our notability standards. Our model of being an encyclopedia that anybody can edit is admittedly flawed, because Wikipedia editors do not all edit Wikipedia responsibly — people try to add content that violates our rules all the time, but our quality control model, which depends on the attention of other editors after the bad edit has already been made, isn't highly effective either: a bad edit to Boris Johnson's or Beyoncé's articles will get caught and reverted within minutes, because they're world-famous figures whose articles generate a lot of traffic, but a bad edit to a low profile person of purely local interest, such as a county councillor, can linger in the article for months because far fewer people are seeing the article in the first place. I once found an article about a smalltown municipal politician in Eastern Europe, which had spent three full years making the completely unsourced claim that the subject was a cannibal pedophile who was known for taking children into the Chernobyl exclusion zone to rape and kill and eat them. And no, I am not making this up — I obviously speedied that shit right away, but somebody really did edit an article to say that, and it really had spent three full years uncaught before I found it. And secondly, even genuinely notable national-level politicians also frequently try to rewrite our articles about them into advertorial PR profiles that resemble their campaign literature rather than proper encyclopedia articles, and/or to bury notable and well-sourced controversies. But that's an WP:NPOV violation, just as problematic as unsourced claims of pedophilia. So as long as we're trying to be an encyclopedia, rather than a social networking platform, we have to maintain notability standards to determine who qualifies for inclusion and who does not — and whether you agree with it or not, we have a longstanding consensus that county councillors fall below the bar unless they can be shown to be much more significant than the norm for some substantive reason.
As well, please read WP:EVERYTHING. Wikipedia is not meant to be "the sum of all knowledge" — our role is not to indiscrimately be about everything and everyone who exists, it is to apply filters to sort out what information is important and valuable for us to document and what information is not. And, again, one of the filters that we have applied, through consensus, is that county councillors are not of wide enough interest to justify keeping Wikipedia articles — and another of those filters, again through consensus, is that the existence of some purely local media coverage in not inherently notable contexts is not automatically enough to exempt a person from having to satisfy our standard inclusion criteria for their occupation. Bearcat ( talk) 18:16, 4 December 2019 (UTC) reply
User:Bearcat. I've never said anywhere that we should allow anyone who happens to get mentioned in a local newspaper (or any newspaper) to be included. I'm suggesting that significant, sustained, non-trivial and non-routine coverage in local news shouldn't be considered differently than similar levels of coverage in national news. That way non-entity parish councillors would probably not meet the bar, but long-serving, top-tier local politicians like Hill and Parker would. I think this is a sensible way of dealing with this issue.
But, more importantly, I think we're getting to the crux of the problem here. It seems from your comment that the distinction that supposedly exists at AfD between the use of local and national sources for establishing notability is ultimately in place because some people feel that it would be unwieldy to maintain the project if we allowed some local politicians to be included. That's why you can't point to a policy; it's not a policy, it's a practice (I'm not saying you're wrong, by the way). So essentially we can split ourselves into two camps: the idealists who think that we should be striving to build an encyclopedia which reflects the sum of knowledge (yes, I know what WP:EVERYTHING says and I also know that summarising is different from being a directory, etc); and the pragmatists who feel that we have to do draw a line in the sand or lose control of the process.
You appear to be a pragmatist (fine). I suppose my first retort would be this: does Rob Parker's article look poorly maintained? Does it strike you or anyone here as having glaring BLP violations, poor citations, OR, POV issues, etc? I don't think it does. If the issue at stake here comes down to drawing a line so that we can keep out the trash, then we need to decide whether Parker's article constitutes trash. IMO it doesn't. Therefore it's better to keep it -- is that not an extension of the logic you've just outlined?
Beside, we also have WP:IAR, which says that "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." At the end of the day, Parker's article is an improvement; there is no harm in it being there; it's useful and well put together. Removing it does far more harm to our readership and our mission than letting it stay. Surely, as someone who seems to be approaching the issue pragmatically, you can agree with that? — Noswall59 ( talk) 00:33, 5 December 2019 (UTC). reply
"I've never said anywhere that we should allow anyone who happens to get mentioned in a local newspaper (or any newspaper) to be included." I didn't say you had suggested that; I said (and am correct) that that's what would be the end result of what you suggested.
"I'm suggesting that significant, sustained, non-trivial and non-routine coverage in local news shouldn't be considered differently than similar levels of coverage in national news. That way non-entity parish councillors would probably not meet the bar, but long-serving, top-tier local politicians like Hill and Parker would." And my point is precisely, and correctly, that "significant, sustained, non-trivial and non-routine coverage in local news" is, by definition, a thing that every single municipal and county councillor and school board trustee on earth always has and can always show. There aren't some local politicians who get more coverage than other local politicians do — if local coverage were all it took to get a local politician over GNG as an exemption from having to satisfy NPOL, then every local politician would always get that exemption, every non-winning candidate for office would always get that exemption, and on and so forth. I didn't say you said that's the way it should be — I said that's the way it will be if we do what you suggest, because no local politician anywhere would ever fail to clear the bar if we put it where you suggest. Doing it your way would not set up the distinction you think — it would simply exempt anybody in politics from ever actually having to pass NPOL at all, because everybody in local politics always generates local press coverage in their local media.
And that, to be clear, is precisely why we have an established consensus that local politicians are not notable until they can show nationalizing coverage that expands beyond just their local area. You can dislike it all you want, you can disagree with its premises all you want, but you can't make it go away just by arguing with me about it — I'm just the messenger, not the decider, in a matter like this. Bearcat ( talk) 01:09, 7 December 2019 (UTC) reply
  • Comment: I've learned that Parker was used as a case study in a 2000 academic book on local politics (I've included this in the "further reading" section of the article). I will be able to view the relevant section of the book on Friday. — Noswall59 ( talk) 17:13, 4 December 2019 (UTC). reply
Noswall59 has done a lot of work to expand the article and people in the discussion may wish to re-examine it. I think that most of the new content would be of value moved to the Lincolnshire County Council article, but isn't mostly about Parker individually and doesn't change the overall picture. However, the case study (what I can see of it through Google Book) does constitute significant coverage. GNG generally requires more than one piece of significant coverage, so I don't think alone it is sufficient to change my !vote, but it's a less clear cut case than before. The case study would also be very useful for the Lincolnshire County Council article. Bondegezou ( talk) 17:52, 4 December 2019 (UTC) reply
Ergo, I should change my stance to Merge to the Lincolnshire County Council article. Bondegezou ( talk) 17:19, 5 December 2019 (UTC) reply
This isn't the case at all – there is in-depth coverage in numerous sources, including a scholarly book and national media like The Guardian and the Local Government Chronicle. — Noswall59 ( talk) 14:05, 8 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.
Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Rob_Parker_(councillor)&oldid=930221505"

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