Please add your votes under the Votes section.
From Mwalcoff:
In the article Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies, after the first bullet, insert the following:
These arguments are from Just zis Guy, you know?
It is hard to see how running for election, in and of itself, makes someone suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia. Candidates for any election who attract significant media attention, or who are inherently notable for other reasons (e.g. candidates from disadvantaged groups), obviously deserve inclusion regardless of what election they're standing for; equally, candidates who do not even attract much attention from their local media probably do not deserve inclusion. Note that this is exactly what our existing guidelines suggest.
It seems to me that the guidelines are not obviously broken. We might, perhaps, remove "Major local" from "Major local political figures..." in the present WP:BIO, to clarify that any political figures, including legislative candidates, can qualify for inclusion if they receive significant press coverage. — Haeleth Talk 20:30, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
From Just zis Guy, you know?:
I propose that coverage is on the basis of an article per electoral competition (e.g. "Berdmondsey South, 1997 General Election" or "California district X, 2005" (excuse ignorance of US terminology). This allows a potted bio of each candidate, plus coverage of the issues in a neutral way.
From Mwalcoff:
As I pointed out in the AfD discussions for David Ashe and Paul Hackett, and similarly to what JZG points out above, there are 435 congressional districts within the United States. These seats come up for re-election every two years. Having a seperate article for every candidate who runs in each of these 435 districts every two years will provide us with a raft of articles of people who are notable solely for their failure to win a Congressional election.
And that's just on the national level. The proposal also makes being a candidate for a state-level office in the U.S. also inherently notable. There are 50 states in the United States. Every state but Nebraska has a bicameral state legislature. Texas has 150 seats within its state House of Representatives, and 31 seats within its state Senate. So there's 481 elections every 6 years, with at least two candidates per election. And that's just for one state out of 50. So again, we're looking at a barrage of article stubs about people who will be notable simply and exclusively because they failed to win an election for state office.
Expanding the terms of WP:BIO to include failed election candidates would unnecessarily expand the scope of Wikipedia in an unproductive way, and would not improve the overall quality of this project. → Ξxtreme Unction { yakł blah} 17:21, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
If there are 600 members of the House of Commons, I think it is clear that we are dealing with different matters of constituency size from one country to the next. (To give a non-U.S. Wikipedians a sense of scale as to constituencies here, there are two bodies of the U.S. federal legislature, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Today most of the Representatives represent a consituency of 500,000 to 700,000 people, and there are 2 Senators for each of the 50 states). Thus I think it would be best to offer a counter-proposal specific to the United States, and I would like to suggest that Just Zis Guy or someone else offer one for the U.K. (and also someone for Canada, and Australia, etc.):
Any thoughts?
I was thinking about something along the same lines as what a user suggested above in an unsigned comment. One issue I do have with the suggestion is that state legisatures can be really important. California state Senate districts are bigger than congressional districts. So I don't agree with ruling out state-level candidates. Similarly, I don't believe primary candidates should necessarily be considered not notable. In some areas, the primary is more important than the general election. Thirdly, polling data won't be available in a lot of races.
Now it's true that the user did not say that people who don't meet the qualifications should always be excluded. But the problem is that some people will think that if the person does not meet a qualification for automatic inclusion on WP:BIO or a similar page, he or she should be excluded, despite the fact that WP:BIO says it is not all-inclusive.
To me, it's become apparent that trying to find a one-size-fits-all policy to determine which candidates should get an article and which shouldn't won't work. All that's important is:
Now perhaps we need something like WP:BIO to help answer the second question. But in the case of candidates, there might be no way to answer it using cut-and-dried criteria. A candidate in a city-council primary might be of interest to more people than an incumbent national legislator somewhere else.
I think the best thing we can do regarding this issue would be to put a note in bold on WP:BIO that says: "The fact that an article fails to meet any of the following criteria does not necessarily mean it should be deleted. Any article that meets (the two numbered criteria above) may be included."
(There's been a lot of debate on this on Wikipedia:Importance and related pages but no consensus, I think.)
Mwalcoff 01:43, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Thus a candidate in a city-council primary is notable if xe has been the subject of in-depth coverage by a newspaper during xyr campaign. Conversely, if the only things published about a candidate for the U.S. Senate except are sourced from the candidate xyrself, and no-one else independent of xem has published anything except for mere recitals of the list of candidates (i.e. directory entries), then xe does not satisfy the primary notability criterion. In other words: Candidates are notable if other people independent of them have published more than just raw political candidate directory entries about them.
Coversely, the second question doesn't help us to decide anything. What humans want to know is not the same as what humans know. People want to know lots of things that Wikipedia cannot, by its nature as a tertiary source tell them. Wikipedia is about what people do know, not what people want to know. Uncle G 00:16, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
I see all sorts of problems here. How do you define "credible candidate"? Some major party candidates are not credible candidates, in that they stand no chance of being elected. How do you define "significant press coverage". Some credible candidates might not receive much coverage before they are elected, but some local papers might give significant coverage to all candidates. We had a discussion on whether a failed UK Green Party candidate should be deleted, I said they should be but the consensus was against. After this I did something possibly a bit naughty and created an article to make a point Anthea Irwin (the only time I have ever done this) and waited to see if somebody called for it to be deleted, nobody has. PatGallacher 17:14, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
What's wrong with covering all actual candidates? Credible ones will have more verifiable info than non-credible ones, and it removes our need to editorialise. Trollderella 22:23, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
If, on the other hand, a national newspaper such as The Age, The Hindu, or The Washington Post independently wrote and published a multiple page spread on my life, my politics, and whether I would be able to continue to make edits to Wikipedia after I became Governor, then I would warrant an encyclopaedia article. My being a candidate for elected office would not have altered my notability at all, and simply isn't a viable notability criterion. What would have altered my notability is other people, the journalists and editorial staff at the newspaper, considering me notable enough that they created and published a non-trivial work of their own, namely the multiple page spread in their newspaper, about me.
If you wish to eliminate the need to editorialize, do it properly, and let the world at large decide notability. Simply measure how notable the world at large has already gauged a subject to be, by seeing whether multiple sources independent of the subject have considered it notable enough to have created and published non-trivial works of their own about it.
"All X are notable" criteria produce directories (be they of "all political candidates", "all companies", "all people", "all web sites", or even "all roads"), and are not appropriate for a tertiary source. They are appropriate for primary sources performing original research, but a tertiary source's primary criterion should be "whatever the secondary sources have considered to be notable enough to warrant non-trivial, other than simple directory entry, coverage, is notable". Uncle G 01:31, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
I think the easiest thing to do here is go by the amount of useful information available on people. And since this is policiticians we're talking about, I mean their political views, agendas and voting habits, not their birthplace and name of their pet dog. There is quite some information on (most) elected people. There is often little information on the candidates, with some big exceptions (e.g. first black/woman/gay runner, specific controversial view, etc, as opposed to joe average who is put on the elections list as a filler). I suspect this corresponds with what some people would call "credible" candidates.
So here's the thing. Keep articles on all politicians with lots of useful information (and if there's an article on them anyway, might as well include birthplace and pet dogs while we're at it). Merge those with little information into lists, containing name and party affiliation (and possibly one or two other informative facts). Ta dah! We have information and it's accessible.
R adiant _>|< 23:56, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
The last thing we need is another schools war. How about if we nominate a period after the election - 3 months, say - after which time if no attempt is made to establight he independent notability of the candidate, and if they are no longer receiving any measurable news coverage, we merge to a historical record of that election? I know this runs counter to normal practice, but there are lots of people who generate a fair bit of discussion during the elction, all of which is of pretty much zero relevance afterwards. Of course, since WP is not a crystal ball or a newspaper, we might just as easily say that information has no place in WP anyway, and nothign should be entered on an election until some time after it closes, at which point historical perspective will allow a more balanced view of the issues and personalities.
Example here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Melissa Brown. A toss-up whether she remains in or not, but it's clear to me that the political-focussed team that created this article is separate from the constituency which is interested in the subject as a person, since the suggested bases for continued inclusion are not mentioned in the original article - in fact it's not even certain at this point that the Google results are the same person, although it's quite likely. - Just zis Guy, you know? [T]/ [C] (W) AfD? 10:39, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
What about in regards to legislative candidates of major parties at lower levels? (States, Provinces, Cities, etc.) The same things in favor above for national level candidates are the same at lower levels, albeit on a smaller scale. If a Congressional or Parliamentary candidate of a major party in any country is up for deletion, let me know and i'll come and vote Keep. karmafist 14:54, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
I just want to add a few points regarding "low level" elections in the UK. Obviously Wiki already has a reasonable delete process for non-notable people and that seems to work, on the whole, fairly well. Candidates seem to automatically have a "saving grace" in that they stand for election, but this could be misused. I have stood for election two times, both for a seat on Preston city council. I don't pretend to be notable or worthy of an article on Wikipedia; I don't think the candidates I stood against have much need to be here either, bar Ron(ald) Atkins who used to be the MP for Preston South who has an obvious notable factor in that he was a member of the Westminster parliament for many years.
Given that the UK parliamentary system allows just about anyone the chance to stand, even if they are trouble makers, publicity seekers and/or non-notable 'paper candidates', it would be a terrific waste of time and resources to bring together enough details on each and every candidate just to allow Wiki to claim (or certain editors to claim) that the resource to find such information is available. There are other such resources on-line. I note that the 2005 general election in the UK had over 3,000 candidates - could Wiki cope with such an increase from one country alone?
I suggest one idea - and this is just for open discussion - of articles for each electoral year along the lines of "Minor Party Candidates in UK General Election 2005", with either summary information or, if absolutely necessary, longer profiles. A table to list independents and randoms could be a tidy-up device.
doktorb 13:01, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
I think policy should at least reflect guys like this, who got a total of 24 votes in a primary election for a seat in the US House of Representatives. Why does he have an article? - R. fiend 17:26, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
Things seem to have trailed off here even as AFD votes on legislative candidates continue to be contentious.
Let me suggest a compromise that I hope can gain consensus approval.
The idea is that when someone wants to create an article on a candidate, he or she first creates an article on the race or party. For elections in which the type of race in which candidates run generally as individuals, such as American elections and nonpartisan elections in Commonwealth countries, the article would be about the race. The format could be "(Year) (type) election, (constituency)." For example: "2002 U.S. House election, Ohio 12th district." The article would give brief bios of the candidates, explain the issues and discuss important campaign events.
For Westminster-system elections, the article would be on the all of that party's candidates running in the election, either nationally or in a given province or region. For example, we might have an article on "Green Party candidates, 39th Canadian federal election, Ontario." The article would include brief bios of the candidates and talk about the platform, campaign events, etc.
At first, searches on the candidates can be redirected to the articles described above. However, if, and only if, enough verifiable information develops on the candidate that the bio gets too big for the article, the candidate can receive a full article on himself or herself. Now we run into the thorny issue of whether that can mean any candidate or just some candidates. If we accept that some candidates, such as Paul Hackett, are notable because of their candidacy, what do we do when people say the Libertarian Party candidate in the same district should have an article? If we allow state Senate candidates in California (who represent more people than members of the U.S. House) can we exclude Wyoming Senate candidates?
In my opinion, the only fair way to decide is to judge based on the amount of independent, verifiable information available on the candidate. I would suppose that the quantity of independent information available on Hackett would not be available for, say, a Libertarian candidate for a state House seat in Rhode Island.
Some people have also raised the concern of what happens to articles on candidates after the election. I think this proposed solution would deal with the problem by directing most candidate articles to pages that won't become outdated after the election. Candidates notable enough to get their own article, such as Hackett, are likely to stay in the news.
Mwalcoff 04:12, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Thanks to Mwalcoff for re-starting this discussion. After reading the discussion, let me share some thoughts. (Disclaimer: I am a US resident, and most familiar with US politics, so my views are mostly applicable to US candidates). First, I'm not sure I like the idea of creating an article for each election, though - that will tend to get unwieldy, and I doubt people will come to Wikipedia looking for articles by those titles. Articles about the candidates are more likely to be found by interested readers and editors.
Our policy currently states that members of both national AND state legislatures are considered notable, as are local political figures who receive significant press coverage. Taking that as a baseline, I believe every major party nominee for NATIONAL legislature (i.e Congress) should be considered notable. Congressmen represent districts of +/- 650,000. Even the least succesful Democratic or Republican nominees for those seats typically get 75,000 votes or more in their unsuccessful bids. As a result, these unsuccesful Congressional candidates are often more widely known than a typical state legislator. For example in my home state of Missouri, a successful state legislative candidate rarely gets more than 10,000 votes. I realize that this invites a large number of articles on unsuccessful congressional candidates. However, most of these candidates would already be considered notable because they previously served in state or local office.
What about candidates for their party's nomination for Congress? Again, these individuals may already be notable for serving in a state legislature or holding local political office. Those that do not meet that threshold would have to be decided on a case by case basis. After the election is over, it should be relatively easy to determine who the "noteable" candidates were. For example, I would propose that any candidate who won more votes in a primary election than another candidate who was a member of a state legislature sould be considered noteable. Another standard could be "did this person receive more votes than a typical state legislator?" It is a bit trickier while the campaign is ongoing. But I would suggest that press reports of fundraising success or major endorsements could help establish the notability of a candidate.
What about minor party (Green, Libertarian, etc.) candidates for Congress? In general, these candidates receive very few votes, and should not be considered notable. Again, a useful test is "Did this person receive as many votes as a typical state legislator?" Generally, the answer will be no. If a particular minor party candidate is doing exceptionally well in a particular campaign, there will probably be significant local press coverage to help document the phenomenon and establish notability. It seems to me that articles about minor party candidates (including aricles created or edited by the candidates themselves) are the single biggest problem leading to this discussion.
Finally, I would suggest that unsuccessful candidates for state legislature, regardless of whether they won their party's nomination are generally not notable. There may be exceptions, such as the California Senate example noted above, but unsuccessful candidates in such large districts may already be notable as local electeds or members of the state house. TMS63112 21:28, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
(outdenting and parsing the discussion some - hope this helps)
My apologies. I was unclear above. In my opinion, an obituary may be an acceptable secondary source for some information but an obituary is never sufficient by itself to verify the contents of a good encyclopedia article. First, only a small percentage of obituaries are actually written and fact-checked by the news staff. Most obituaries are written by family members or others with a less-than-objective viewpoint. Any information beyond the most basic of facts (such as date of death) must still be confirmed from another source. Second, most obituaries are very short synopses and tend to focus on family details. Wikipedia is not a mere memorial. We must have much more content than typically shows up in an obituary in order to support a proper encyclopedia article. All that other content must still be verified. I wasn't trying to say that an obituary is inherently untrustworthy (though we should always retain some skepticism) but that an obituary alone is insufficient to support an encyclopedia article. Rossami (talk) 15:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I'll challenge your statement that the In The News section is supposed to inspire people to create new articles based on current events. I believe that it is supposed to attract and educate readers - that it's a way of showing off how complete our encyclopedia already was. The idea was, in my opinion, that we were so good that for any given current event, we already have articles which are relevent to understanding the background and context of the current event. It did devolve into "let's create new articles". That was not a particularly good idea and eventually led to the creation of WikiNews. We're still struggling to understand the proper distinction between an encyclopedia article and a news article. I think that In The News serves a purpose but it's not to drive the creation of new articles. Rossami (talk) 15:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
Almost certainly, yes. It's been proposed before and in several different places. The most recent and most rich discussion was at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not during the discussion about "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball" (now in the archives). The conversation moved on without a real decision but more and more people are starting to worry about the inherent verifiability of current events. Elections are simply a recent and relatively concrete example of the problem. (At the risk of dragging us into another tangent, the 2004 Ohio election "scandals" were a perfect example. After the election, the papers were boiling over with accusations and counter-accusations of election "irregularities". That conflict spilled over into Wikipedia. After all, we were merely citing "reliable" news sources, too often ignoring the disclaimers made right in the news articles. Months later, after the experts finally had a chance to evaluate the data and to reach some meaningful conclusions, the allegations were dismissed as either not supported by the facts or as the statistically normal failures of any such large-scale exercise. We are still struggling to clean up the various Wikipedia articles from the partisan attacks and false statements made during and shortly after the campaign.) Unfortunately, I think we're still at the point of asking more people to think about the problem of verifiability for current events. In my opinion, more people are becoming aware of the problem but there might not yet be the critical mass of people who recognize the problem in order to challenge some of our long-held traditions and practices. Only when we have reached some level of consensus on the problem can we begin to seriously discuss potential solutions. The 12 month limit is attractive to me but there might be other equally effective solutions somewhere. Rossami (talk) 15:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I do not think candidacy in any office is, in itself, notable. If the candidate wins, he becomes notable. Someone may say, "Yeah, but what about someone running for president of the US?" or any other such major position. My answer is the person is probably notable even without running for office and can be included for those reasons. One wouldn't list people who try out for a major sporting team, for example. They become notable once they make it. Ifnord 22:47, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Think about it another way. We have an article on Cindy Sheehan. She is not an elected official. She is famous for being in the media a lot due to her criticism of George Bush. Paul Hackett is also famous for being in the media a lot criticizing George Bush. The two gained their fame through different paths — Sheehan by camping out in Texas, Hackett by running for office. But they're now doing the same kind of thing. If we follow your guidelines, and those of the other people who oppose the proposed policy, we would delete the Hackett article. Do you also favor deleting the Sheehan article? Or should we favor Sheehan because she is not running for office?
To turn your sports analogy on its head: We have an article on Samuel Peter, a top heavyweight boxing contender. Should we delete his article until he wins the heavyweight title? Of course not.
If we get rid of articles on people like Hackett, I also want to get rid of articles on episodes of television programs, Major League Soccer players, Canadian indy synth-pop bands and the other 99 percent of Wikipedia content that is less important than information on candidates for public office. For heaven's sake, we have a featured article on Spoo, which is described as "a valuable and highly desired food product from the fictional Babylon 5 universe." If you want Wikipedia to be more like a traditional encyclopedia, with thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of articles, fine. But don't start your cutting here; start with something that's not important -- Mwalcoff 23:35, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
These debates often get turned into, "Well, what about article x? If we allow that then we should allow this." I believe that's besides the point. There will always be a sillier article which has somehow reached a lack of consensus to delete ( Spoo being a good example). Ifnord 00:16, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
The problem, as I stated before, is that a lot of AFD voters seem to think that if a type of person isn't specifically listed for inclusion on WP:BIO, then the person's article should be deleted. Perhaps what we really need to do is to clarify the point of WP:BIO, which is not to automatically exclude classes of people. -- Mwalcoff 01:08, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
There is now an individual example taking place of a discussion on this issue at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anthea Irwin. (See a previous exampe at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jacob Sanders. PatGallacher 12:12, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Please add your votes under the Votes section.
From Mwalcoff:
In the article Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies, after the first bullet, insert the following:
These arguments are from Just zis Guy, you know?
It is hard to see how running for election, in and of itself, makes someone suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia. Candidates for any election who attract significant media attention, or who are inherently notable for other reasons (e.g. candidates from disadvantaged groups), obviously deserve inclusion regardless of what election they're standing for; equally, candidates who do not even attract much attention from their local media probably do not deserve inclusion. Note that this is exactly what our existing guidelines suggest.
It seems to me that the guidelines are not obviously broken. We might, perhaps, remove "Major local" from "Major local political figures..." in the present WP:BIO, to clarify that any political figures, including legislative candidates, can qualify for inclusion if they receive significant press coverage. — Haeleth Talk 20:30, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
From Just zis Guy, you know?:
I propose that coverage is on the basis of an article per electoral competition (e.g. "Berdmondsey South, 1997 General Election" or "California district X, 2005" (excuse ignorance of US terminology). This allows a potted bio of each candidate, plus coverage of the issues in a neutral way.
From Mwalcoff:
As I pointed out in the AfD discussions for David Ashe and Paul Hackett, and similarly to what JZG points out above, there are 435 congressional districts within the United States. These seats come up for re-election every two years. Having a seperate article for every candidate who runs in each of these 435 districts every two years will provide us with a raft of articles of people who are notable solely for their failure to win a Congressional election.
And that's just on the national level. The proposal also makes being a candidate for a state-level office in the U.S. also inherently notable. There are 50 states in the United States. Every state but Nebraska has a bicameral state legislature. Texas has 150 seats within its state House of Representatives, and 31 seats within its state Senate. So there's 481 elections every 6 years, with at least two candidates per election. And that's just for one state out of 50. So again, we're looking at a barrage of article stubs about people who will be notable simply and exclusively because they failed to win an election for state office.
Expanding the terms of WP:BIO to include failed election candidates would unnecessarily expand the scope of Wikipedia in an unproductive way, and would not improve the overall quality of this project. → Ξxtreme Unction { yakł blah} 17:21, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
If there are 600 members of the House of Commons, I think it is clear that we are dealing with different matters of constituency size from one country to the next. (To give a non-U.S. Wikipedians a sense of scale as to constituencies here, there are two bodies of the U.S. federal legislature, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Today most of the Representatives represent a consituency of 500,000 to 700,000 people, and there are 2 Senators for each of the 50 states). Thus I think it would be best to offer a counter-proposal specific to the United States, and I would like to suggest that Just Zis Guy or someone else offer one for the U.K. (and also someone for Canada, and Australia, etc.):
Any thoughts?
I was thinking about something along the same lines as what a user suggested above in an unsigned comment. One issue I do have with the suggestion is that state legisatures can be really important. California state Senate districts are bigger than congressional districts. So I don't agree with ruling out state-level candidates. Similarly, I don't believe primary candidates should necessarily be considered not notable. In some areas, the primary is more important than the general election. Thirdly, polling data won't be available in a lot of races.
Now it's true that the user did not say that people who don't meet the qualifications should always be excluded. But the problem is that some people will think that if the person does not meet a qualification for automatic inclusion on WP:BIO or a similar page, he or she should be excluded, despite the fact that WP:BIO says it is not all-inclusive.
To me, it's become apparent that trying to find a one-size-fits-all policy to determine which candidates should get an article and which shouldn't won't work. All that's important is:
Now perhaps we need something like WP:BIO to help answer the second question. But in the case of candidates, there might be no way to answer it using cut-and-dried criteria. A candidate in a city-council primary might be of interest to more people than an incumbent national legislator somewhere else.
I think the best thing we can do regarding this issue would be to put a note in bold on WP:BIO that says: "The fact that an article fails to meet any of the following criteria does not necessarily mean it should be deleted. Any article that meets (the two numbered criteria above) may be included."
(There's been a lot of debate on this on Wikipedia:Importance and related pages but no consensus, I think.)
Mwalcoff 01:43, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Thus a candidate in a city-council primary is notable if xe has been the subject of in-depth coverage by a newspaper during xyr campaign. Conversely, if the only things published about a candidate for the U.S. Senate except are sourced from the candidate xyrself, and no-one else independent of xem has published anything except for mere recitals of the list of candidates (i.e. directory entries), then xe does not satisfy the primary notability criterion. In other words: Candidates are notable if other people independent of them have published more than just raw political candidate directory entries about them.
Coversely, the second question doesn't help us to decide anything. What humans want to know is not the same as what humans know. People want to know lots of things that Wikipedia cannot, by its nature as a tertiary source tell them. Wikipedia is about what people do know, not what people want to know. Uncle G 00:16, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
I see all sorts of problems here. How do you define "credible candidate"? Some major party candidates are not credible candidates, in that they stand no chance of being elected. How do you define "significant press coverage". Some credible candidates might not receive much coverage before they are elected, but some local papers might give significant coverage to all candidates. We had a discussion on whether a failed UK Green Party candidate should be deleted, I said they should be but the consensus was against. After this I did something possibly a bit naughty and created an article to make a point Anthea Irwin (the only time I have ever done this) and waited to see if somebody called for it to be deleted, nobody has. PatGallacher 17:14, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
What's wrong with covering all actual candidates? Credible ones will have more verifiable info than non-credible ones, and it removes our need to editorialise. Trollderella 22:23, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
If, on the other hand, a national newspaper such as The Age, The Hindu, or The Washington Post independently wrote and published a multiple page spread on my life, my politics, and whether I would be able to continue to make edits to Wikipedia after I became Governor, then I would warrant an encyclopaedia article. My being a candidate for elected office would not have altered my notability at all, and simply isn't a viable notability criterion. What would have altered my notability is other people, the journalists and editorial staff at the newspaper, considering me notable enough that they created and published a non-trivial work of their own, namely the multiple page spread in their newspaper, about me.
If you wish to eliminate the need to editorialize, do it properly, and let the world at large decide notability. Simply measure how notable the world at large has already gauged a subject to be, by seeing whether multiple sources independent of the subject have considered it notable enough to have created and published non-trivial works of their own about it.
"All X are notable" criteria produce directories (be they of "all political candidates", "all companies", "all people", "all web sites", or even "all roads"), and are not appropriate for a tertiary source. They are appropriate for primary sources performing original research, but a tertiary source's primary criterion should be "whatever the secondary sources have considered to be notable enough to warrant non-trivial, other than simple directory entry, coverage, is notable". Uncle G 01:31, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
I think the easiest thing to do here is go by the amount of useful information available on people. And since this is policiticians we're talking about, I mean their political views, agendas and voting habits, not their birthplace and name of their pet dog. There is quite some information on (most) elected people. There is often little information on the candidates, with some big exceptions (e.g. first black/woman/gay runner, specific controversial view, etc, as opposed to joe average who is put on the elections list as a filler). I suspect this corresponds with what some people would call "credible" candidates.
So here's the thing. Keep articles on all politicians with lots of useful information (and if there's an article on them anyway, might as well include birthplace and pet dogs while we're at it). Merge those with little information into lists, containing name and party affiliation (and possibly one or two other informative facts). Ta dah! We have information and it's accessible.
R adiant _>|< 23:56, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
The last thing we need is another schools war. How about if we nominate a period after the election - 3 months, say - after which time if no attempt is made to establight he independent notability of the candidate, and if they are no longer receiving any measurable news coverage, we merge to a historical record of that election? I know this runs counter to normal practice, but there are lots of people who generate a fair bit of discussion during the elction, all of which is of pretty much zero relevance afterwards. Of course, since WP is not a crystal ball or a newspaper, we might just as easily say that information has no place in WP anyway, and nothign should be entered on an election until some time after it closes, at which point historical perspective will allow a more balanced view of the issues and personalities.
Example here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Melissa Brown. A toss-up whether she remains in or not, but it's clear to me that the political-focussed team that created this article is separate from the constituency which is interested in the subject as a person, since the suggested bases for continued inclusion are not mentioned in the original article - in fact it's not even certain at this point that the Google results are the same person, although it's quite likely. - Just zis Guy, you know? [T]/ [C] (W) AfD? 10:39, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
What about in regards to legislative candidates of major parties at lower levels? (States, Provinces, Cities, etc.) The same things in favor above for national level candidates are the same at lower levels, albeit on a smaller scale. If a Congressional or Parliamentary candidate of a major party in any country is up for deletion, let me know and i'll come and vote Keep. karmafist 14:54, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
I just want to add a few points regarding "low level" elections in the UK. Obviously Wiki already has a reasonable delete process for non-notable people and that seems to work, on the whole, fairly well. Candidates seem to automatically have a "saving grace" in that they stand for election, but this could be misused. I have stood for election two times, both for a seat on Preston city council. I don't pretend to be notable or worthy of an article on Wikipedia; I don't think the candidates I stood against have much need to be here either, bar Ron(ald) Atkins who used to be the MP for Preston South who has an obvious notable factor in that he was a member of the Westminster parliament for many years.
Given that the UK parliamentary system allows just about anyone the chance to stand, even if they are trouble makers, publicity seekers and/or non-notable 'paper candidates', it would be a terrific waste of time and resources to bring together enough details on each and every candidate just to allow Wiki to claim (or certain editors to claim) that the resource to find such information is available. There are other such resources on-line. I note that the 2005 general election in the UK had over 3,000 candidates - could Wiki cope with such an increase from one country alone?
I suggest one idea - and this is just for open discussion - of articles for each electoral year along the lines of "Minor Party Candidates in UK General Election 2005", with either summary information or, if absolutely necessary, longer profiles. A table to list independents and randoms could be a tidy-up device.
doktorb 13:01, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
I think policy should at least reflect guys like this, who got a total of 24 votes in a primary election for a seat in the US House of Representatives. Why does he have an article? - R. fiend 17:26, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
Things seem to have trailed off here even as AFD votes on legislative candidates continue to be contentious.
Let me suggest a compromise that I hope can gain consensus approval.
The idea is that when someone wants to create an article on a candidate, he or she first creates an article on the race or party. For elections in which the type of race in which candidates run generally as individuals, such as American elections and nonpartisan elections in Commonwealth countries, the article would be about the race. The format could be "(Year) (type) election, (constituency)." For example: "2002 U.S. House election, Ohio 12th district." The article would give brief bios of the candidates, explain the issues and discuss important campaign events.
For Westminster-system elections, the article would be on the all of that party's candidates running in the election, either nationally or in a given province or region. For example, we might have an article on "Green Party candidates, 39th Canadian federal election, Ontario." The article would include brief bios of the candidates and talk about the platform, campaign events, etc.
At first, searches on the candidates can be redirected to the articles described above. However, if, and only if, enough verifiable information develops on the candidate that the bio gets too big for the article, the candidate can receive a full article on himself or herself. Now we run into the thorny issue of whether that can mean any candidate or just some candidates. If we accept that some candidates, such as Paul Hackett, are notable because of their candidacy, what do we do when people say the Libertarian Party candidate in the same district should have an article? If we allow state Senate candidates in California (who represent more people than members of the U.S. House) can we exclude Wyoming Senate candidates?
In my opinion, the only fair way to decide is to judge based on the amount of independent, verifiable information available on the candidate. I would suppose that the quantity of independent information available on Hackett would not be available for, say, a Libertarian candidate for a state House seat in Rhode Island.
Some people have also raised the concern of what happens to articles on candidates after the election. I think this proposed solution would deal with the problem by directing most candidate articles to pages that won't become outdated after the election. Candidates notable enough to get their own article, such as Hackett, are likely to stay in the news.
Mwalcoff 04:12, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Thanks to Mwalcoff for re-starting this discussion. After reading the discussion, let me share some thoughts. (Disclaimer: I am a US resident, and most familiar with US politics, so my views are mostly applicable to US candidates). First, I'm not sure I like the idea of creating an article for each election, though - that will tend to get unwieldy, and I doubt people will come to Wikipedia looking for articles by those titles. Articles about the candidates are more likely to be found by interested readers and editors.
Our policy currently states that members of both national AND state legislatures are considered notable, as are local political figures who receive significant press coverage. Taking that as a baseline, I believe every major party nominee for NATIONAL legislature (i.e Congress) should be considered notable. Congressmen represent districts of +/- 650,000. Even the least succesful Democratic or Republican nominees for those seats typically get 75,000 votes or more in their unsuccessful bids. As a result, these unsuccesful Congressional candidates are often more widely known than a typical state legislator. For example in my home state of Missouri, a successful state legislative candidate rarely gets more than 10,000 votes. I realize that this invites a large number of articles on unsuccessful congressional candidates. However, most of these candidates would already be considered notable because they previously served in state or local office.
What about candidates for their party's nomination for Congress? Again, these individuals may already be notable for serving in a state legislature or holding local political office. Those that do not meet that threshold would have to be decided on a case by case basis. After the election is over, it should be relatively easy to determine who the "noteable" candidates were. For example, I would propose that any candidate who won more votes in a primary election than another candidate who was a member of a state legislature sould be considered noteable. Another standard could be "did this person receive more votes than a typical state legislator?" It is a bit trickier while the campaign is ongoing. But I would suggest that press reports of fundraising success or major endorsements could help establish the notability of a candidate.
What about minor party (Green, Libertarian, etc.) candidates for Congress? In general, these candidates receive very few votes, and should not be considered notable. Again, a useful test is "Did this person receive as many votes as a typical state legislator?" Generally, the answer will be no. If a particular minor party candidate is doing exceptionally well in a particular campaign, there will probably be significant local press coverage to help document the phenomenon and establish notability. It seems to me that articles about minor party candidates (including aricles created or edited by the candidates themselves) are the single biggest problem leading to this discussion.
Finally, I would suggest that unsuccessful candidates for state legislature, regardless of whether they won their party's nomination are generally not notable. There may be exceptions, such as the California Senate example noted above, but unsuccessful candidates in such large districts may already be notable as local electeds or members of the state house. TMS63112 21:28, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
(outdenting and parsing the discussion some - hope this helps)
My apologies. I was unclear above. In my opinion, an obituary may be an acceptable secondary source for some information but an obituary is never sufficient by itself to verify the contents of a good encyclopedia article. First, only a small percentage of obituaries are actually written and fact-checked by the news staff. Most obituaries are written by family members or others with a less-than-objective viewpoint. Any information beyond the most basic of facts (such as date of death) must still be confirmed from another source. Second, most obituaries are very short synopses and tend to focus on family details. Wikipedia is not a mere memorial. We must have much more content than typically shows up in an obituary in order to support a proper encyclopedia article. All that other content must still be verified. I wasn't trying to say that an obituary is inherently untrustworthy (though we should always retain some skepticism) but that an obituary alone is insufficient to support an encyclopedia article. Rossami (talk) 15:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I'll challenge your statement that the In The News section is supposed to inspire people to create new articles based on current events. I believe that it is supposed to attract and educate readers - that it's a way of showing off how complete our encyclopedia already was. The idea was, in my opinion, that we were so good that for any given current event, we already have articles which are relevent to understanding the background and context of the current event. It did devolve into "let's create new articles". That was not a particularly good idea and eventually led to the creation of WikiNews. We're still struggling to understand the proper distinction between an encyclopedia article and a news article. I think that In The News serves a purpose but it's not to drive the creation of new articles. Rossami (talk) 15:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
Almost certainly, yes. It's been proposed before and in several different places. The most recent and most rich discussion was at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not during the discussion about "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball" (now in the archives). The conversation moved on without a real decision but more and more people are starting to worry about the inherent verifiability of current events. Elections are simply a recent and relatively concrete example of the problem. (At the risk of dragging us into another tangent, the 2004 Ohio election "scandals" were a perfect example. After the election, the papers were boiling over with accusations and counter-accusations of election "irregularities". That conflict spilled over into Wikipedia. After all, we were merely citing "reliable" news sources, too often ignoring the disclaimers made right in the news articles. Months later, after the experts finally had a chance to evaluate the data and to reach some meaningful conclusions, the allegations were dismissed as either not supported by the facts or as the statistically normal failures of any such large-scale exercise. We are still struggling to clean up the various Wikipedia articles from the partisan attacks and false statements made during and shortly after the campaign.) Unfortunately, I think we're still at the point of asking more people to think about the problem of verifiability for current events. In my opinion, more people are becoming aware of the problem but there might not yet be the critical mass of people who recognize the problem in order to challenge some of our long-held traditions and practices. Only when we have reached some level of consensus on the problem can we begin to seriously discuss potential solutions. The 12 month limit is attractive to me but there might be other equally effective solutions somewhere. Rossami (talk) 15:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I do not think candidacy in any office is, in itself, notable. If the candidate wins, he becomes notable. Someone may say, "Yeah, but what about someone running for president of the US?" or any other such major position. My answer is the person is probably notable even without running for office and can be included for those reasons. One wouldn't list people who try out for a major sporting team, for example. They become notable once they make it. Ifnord 22:47, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Think about it another way. We have an article on Cindy Sheehan. She is not an elected official. She is famous for being in the media a lot due to her criticism of George Bush. Paul Hackett is also famous for being in the media a lot criticizing George Bush. The two gained their fame through different paths — Sheehan by camping out in Texas, Hackett by running for office. But they're now doing the same kind of thing. If we follow your guidelines, and those of the other people who oppose the proposed policy, we would delete the Hackett article. Do you also favor deleting the Sheehan article? Or should we favor Sheehan because she is not running for office?
To turn your sports analogy on its head: We have an article on Samuel Peter, a top heavyweight boxing contender. Should we delete his article until he wins the heavyweight title? Of course not.
If we get rid of articles on people like Hackett, I also want to get rid of articles on episodes of television programs, Major League Soccer players, Canadian indy synth-pop bands and the other 99 percent of Wikipedia content that is less important than information on candidates for public office. For heaven's sake, we have a featured article on Spoo, which is described as "a valuable and highly desired food product from the fictional Babylon 5 universe." If you want Wikipedia to be more like a traditional encyclopedia, with thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of articles, fine. But don't start your cutting here; start with something that's not important -- Mwalcoff 23:35, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
These debates often get turned into, "Well, what about article x? If we allow that then we should allow this." I believe that's besides the point. There will always be a sillier article which has somehow reached a lack of consensus to delete ( Spoo being a good example). Ifnord 00:16, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
The problem, as I stated before, is that a lot of AFD voters seem to think that if a type of person isn't specifically listed for inclusion on WP:BIO, then the person's article should be deleted. Perhaps what we really need to do is to clarify the point of WP:BIO, which is not to automatically exclude classes of people. -- Mwalcoff 01:08, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
There is now an individual example taking place of a discussion on this issue at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anthea Irwin. (See a previous exampe at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jacob Sanders. PatGallacher 12:12, 5 February 2006 (UTC)