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.
No significant, in-depth coverage; he has had a career in government, business, and the military, but nothing that meets the notability threshold. This is the second AfD;
the first, eight years ago, resulted in no consensus.
Neutralitytalk15:40, 30 July 2019 (UTC)reply
Delete. My opinion has been the same for the last 12 years, that in a two party system, the candidate of the losing party in the general election for a national office s should have an article. This does not apply to primary elections Nor does it apply to a State Senate, which was his position he actually ran for. When it does apply , if looked for properly, there's always going to be enough material, such the coverage leading upto the election will be similar. Not doing this is introducing a deliberate bias into Wikipedia in favor of incumbents. That's not a political bias towards one party or another, since which party wins the seat will vary. But it's a bias in favor of the Establishment, whatever the establishment may consist of that year. In the past, my view has not usually been accepted, but I still think it's the properly encyclopedic position.
Since this does mot apply to him, this is a case where it does meet the GNG without any ambiguity--the Washington Post is one of the the two most important newspaper sources for US politics, and there are four articles there.
There's an important reason for deletion which we did indeed not pay that much attention to 8 years ago: the articles is expansively promotional, essentially a campaign advertisement. It could possibly be rewritten, but I doubt anyone is likely to do so. DGG (
talk )
06:09, 31 July 2019 (UTC)reply
Just to be clear, as legitimately important as the Washington Post may be as a source for political coverage of Congress and the White House, it is still not a magic free pass to the "more special than other unelected candidates" brand of notability just because he happens to have been an unelected candidate inside the WaPo's local coverage area. If a person doesn't have a strong notability claim that would pass
WP:NPOL in the traditional way, then they're not magically more notable than everybody else who's done the exact same things without getting into Wikipedia articles just because they live in Metro Washington and thus got their purely routine local campaign coverage in the WaPo instead of the South Podunk Intelligencer.
Bearcat (
talk)
01:59, 4 August 2019 (UTC)reply
Delete. People do not get Wikipedia articles just for being candidates in elections they did not win, but this is not demonstrating that he has preexisting notability for other reasons that would have gotten him an article independently of the candidacy. It is far, far too dependent on
primary sourcing that is not support for notability at all, such as his own campaign literature and his own writing and staff profiles and/or press releases from his own employers, and even the minority of the footnotes that actually represent
reliable source coverage still features glancing namechecks of his existence in coverage of other people — so while there are a couple of sources left that are both reliable and substantively about him, there aren't enough of those to make a person notable just for being an unsuccessful candidate.
Bearcat (
talk)
14:41, 31 July 2019 (UTC)reply
You are right about
WP:PROF#C6. My meaning was that there should be evaluation of the subject under WP:PROF to determine whether the subject might qualify as an academic. --
Enos733 (
talk)
22:53, 2 August 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.