Talk:Jane Scharf

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Removal of request to delete: Has received coverage in both Ottawa dailies, CBC radio and countless local papers. Definitely meets notability criteria due to reliable secondary sources.

Please do not end the AFD procedure like this - you should talk it out at the AFD page and try to reach consensus. TastyCakes (talk) 17:35, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I've had just about enough of you. If you persist in attacking every single Ottawa-based activism article (as well as wiki-stalking me around), I *will* bring you to the attention of the Wikipedia bourgeoisie. SmashTheState (talk) 18:22, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Ok, go ahead. TastyCakes (talk) 23:22, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

I want to stress that people whose notability is exclusively local to one city are not necessarily entitled to Wikipedia articles. No matter how big a city is, unsuccessful mayoral candidates are not notable just for being candidates — as WP:POLITICIAN clearly states, in most cases the bare minimum that needs to be met for a politician to count as notable is having actually held elective office, not just running and failing. In order to qualify for a Wikipedia article, a candidate for office — past or present, it doesn't matter — needs to either (a) be someone about whom it would be possible to write a keepable, quality article even if they weren't running for office, or (b) garner coverage that goes well beyond what could logically be expected from basic coverage of the race itself.

It isn't entirely impossible for a political candidate to still be notable — but coverage which merely confirms that she exists, by mentioning her in passing while being primarily about the race, doesn't cut it. There needs to be substantial and sustained coverage in which she's the primary subject. If for some reason she happens to garner so much attention that she even gets coverage on CNN, that would put her over the bar — but one 500-word blurb in the Ottawa Citizen doesn't. And not because the Citizen isn't otherwise a valid source, but because giving at least cursory coverage to everybody in their own coverage area's municipal elections is their job — so it doesn't speak to why an international audience needs to know anything about her.

And this isn't a bias issue, either. I'm an unrepentant lefty who used to live in Ottawa myself — and I've even deleted articles about politicians that I personally voted for, if they lost and the sources weren't there to demonstrate any notability beyond their candidacy. We're here to be an encyclopedia, not a database of election campaign literature.

And the bottom line here is that since there's been an AFD on her in the past which ended in a delete, any new article about her can be speedied on sight if it doesn't make a much more convincing case for her notability than we've seen in any version of the article posted to date. Bearcat (talk) 00:54, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

There have been literally hundreds of newspaper articles written about Jane and her activities. She's been active as an activist and organizer for something like 30 years. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone in Ottawa who doesn't at least know her name. She certainly has more notability than most of city council, all of whom have their own Wikipedia articles. Furthermore, one does not need to be covered by CNN to be notable, but it's rather telling that you consider CNN to be the gold standard of notability. But you know what? I don't really care. I much prefer to see biographies about activists deleted than subject to the kind of bias which is de rigeur around here. The entire reason I ended up on Wikipedia to begin with was a deliberately insulting bio about me which someone manufactured from whole cloth, and which sat here for months. The minute a bunch of people started modifying the article to make it factual, it was deleted as "non-notable." Apparently it was a notable article only while it was a libelous hoax. And people wonder why Wikipedia attracts such contempt. SmashTheState (talk) 09:37, 2 August 2010 (UTC)