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Image copyright problem with Image:Noah Lemas.JPG

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AfD nomination of Noah lemas

An article that you have been involved in editing, Noah lemas, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Noah lemas. Thank you. SWik78 (talk) 18:07, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Noah Lemas

I sympathize with where you're coming from. I tend to be pretty inclusionist with political figures especially, which often puts me on the losing side of these things. I think your approach - to wait until more coverage becomes available and then re-create - is probably a good one. I'd actually suggest putting the current article in your userspace where you can keep working on it after it's deleted. I can help you with that, if you'd like. Also, articles that have already been deleted in AfD debates can be deleted without another debate provided that the content is basically the same. For that reason, when you re-create, you should consider putting on the article talk page "This article is substantially different than the article of the same title that was deleted after an AfD, and includes evidence of significant coverage by reliable third party sources that was not present in the deleted article. For these reasons, it is not eligible for speedy deletion under criterion G4".

On the question of coverage, offline sources are theoretically as good as online ones (of course they're much less convenient), and the Bend Bulletin should qualify as one. However, unless he's also received coverage in other sources, the Bulletin coverage probably wouldn't be enough even if it was online. Does The Oregonian not cover all congressional races in Oregon? It would seem to be not too arduous a task, given that the state only has five districts.

As for the question of whether or not winning the Democratic nomination is enough to confer notability, the answer is no. WP:BIO states "Just being...an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability". That said, being an unelected candidate also doesn't (contrary to popular belief) automatically make you non-notable. In that case, it all comes down to the existence of reliable sources.

Lastly, and on a slight change of subject, I have the impression that you're somehow affiliated with Mr. Lemas's campaign. If that is indeed the case, I'd encourage you to read User:Uncle_G/On_notability#Writing_about_subjects_close_to_you as well as WP:COI.

Please let me know if there's anything else I can help you with. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 05:49, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

You raise some major issues in your last message, and I'll do my best to address them all in some semblance of an organized fashion.

• It sounds to me as though Lemas probably hasn't received enough coverage yet to be notable by Wikipedia's standards. The Bulletin profile is a huge start, but the requirement for multiple sources helps distinguish between human interest subjects and truly notable ones (newspapers, as I'm sure we both know, make a habit of running the occasional feature on somebody who's interesting for whatever reason, but not exactly notable). I assume that if he wins the nomination, other papers will run actual stories on him (instead of merely mentioning his name and some biographical details), and at that point he'd be much more likely to survive an AfD.
• The best place to list sources that have covered a subject actually isn't on the article talk page, but in the article itself, via footnotes (I can help you with the technical elements if you need it). It's actually the presence of this referencing in the article that helps to demonstrate notability.
• This leads me into a very important concept: verifiability. This is one of Wikipedia's core policies, and it states that everything said in Wikipedia needs to be verifiable by reliable sources. Notability is, at its core, an offshoot of this: if a subject hasn't been covered by third party reliable sources, it's impossible to write a verifiable article about it. Of course, it goes a little bit deeper than that...
• You ask how notability is defined. Well, its core definition is here (I suspect you've already read it). There are several guidelines that suss it out a little further for different subjects - WP:BIO is the guideline that does so for individuals, including politicians. You've no doubt noticed, though, that there's substantial ambiguity in all of this (I assume it was that ambiguity that led you to ask me how it's defined). This ambiguity is resolved (sort of) through thousands and thousands of AfD discussions. Sometimes these discussions contradict each other, but generally some consistent themes have emerged on how the community applies notability WP:OUTCOMES#People lists some of these common themes as they apply to individuals (this isn't policy or a guideline, but rather a list of some consistent patterns that have emerged; of course, people participating in AfD discussions are free to defy these patterns and, over time, sometimes new patterns emerge. Other times, most especially in the case of high schools, no patterns emerge and every individual AfD is a bit of a crapshoot.
• On the idea that notability is dependent on terrestrial radii, you're not all together wrong. Certainly, somebody who's moderately famous on a national or global scale is more likely to be considered notable than somebody who's extremely famous locally. However, like almost everything else at Wikipedia, that's not hard and fast: right now, I'm working on improving articles on members of the 26th Legislative Assembly of Alberta (see Tony Abbott (Canadian politician), Cindy Ady, and Bharat Agnihotri for examples of articles I've completed; I perhaps flatter myself to think that they're good indicators of what articles about "minor" politicians should look like). These people are probably pretty famous in their electoral district (the average such district having a population of roughly thirty to forty thousand people), are known to a handful of political nerds in the rest of the province, and are pretty much unheard of anywhere else. By simple measure of terrestrial radius, these people aren't very notable at all. Yet according to WP:BIO, they're automatically notable. Why? I couldn't give you any answer more satisfactory than "because that's what the consensus of the community has concluded over the years".
• For this reason, except for the cases covered specifically by notability guidelines, I try to focus arguments in AfD less on who a person is and more on the coverage they've received. I happen to believe that major party candidates (i.e. Democratic/Republican-nominated) for state Governor, even those who win about 15% of the vote, are always going to be notable. But in an AfD debate, if I say "This person is notable by reason of being a major party nominee for state Governor," somebody of a more deletionist bent is going to point out (as I did to you above) that, according to WP:BIO, "just being...an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability", and I really can't argue against that. However, if I say "this person has been the subject of coverage by multiple third party reliable sources", and I then point out what those are (hopefully the article creator has done most of the work for me), that's much harder for other people to argue against, because it refers directly to the primary notability criterion of WP:N.
• You ask "If the worst case scenario developed at Wikipedia (that is to say everyone and their bitch's whelp suddenly had pages on Wikipedia), how does that really hurt anyone?" As I said, as an inclusionist I have some sympathy for that viewpoint. Indeed, there are a handful of truly radical editors who hold that "notability" is nonsense, and that all that really matters is verifibility: if a newspaper happens to interview me as part of a "public reaction" story, you could write an article on me that says "Steve Smith is an Edmonton resident who believes that Stephen Harper has not been doing a good job as Prime Minister," reference it to that one story, and all is well. I'm not that inclusionist, because I do see some harm to having articles about non-notable subjects:

• They would clutter up the namespace. Here's a list of all of the Steve Smiths who have so far been deemed sufficiently notable for Wikipedia articles. This list is going to expand over time as it is, since every time a Steve Smith gets elected to a state house of plays for a professional sports team, that's another addition to the list. If we expanded it further, it would get even messier and article names would have to become more and more specific, and articles harder and harder to find. An example: I don't know if you follow hockey, but if a typical hockey fan were looking for Steve Smith the hockey player, they'd mean this guy. But if they not unreasonably searched for "Steve Smith (ice hockey)", they'd get this guy. If we expanded notability to include college and junior hockey players (who are currently generally excluded), I'm sure there'd be a few more hockey players named Steve Smith.
• Quality control becomes harder. Right now we have X Wikipedia editors who are involved in general quality control of the project. We have Y articles. This means that each of the quality control editors needs to keep his/her eye on Y/X articles for an acceptable overall level of quality to be maintained. In fact, X isn't high enough for that to happen; click "random article" a few times and you will find some unspeakably lousy articles that suffer from the lack of attention by quality control editors. If you double Y, the problem will only get bigger.
• Wikipedia would become a haven for, for want of a better word, spammers. Everybody involved in any kind of commercial activity would write a promotional article about his/her company. That already happens, actually, but most of them get deleted as non-notable. However, if notability criteria were gone, we wouldn't be able to delete them for being non-notable. But it's unlikely that we'd have enough editors to edit all of these articles up to the point where they weren't just promotional blurbs, and Wikipedia would gradually transform into a business directory of sorts (it's not just businesses, but rather anything that somebody might be interested in promoting - yes, political candidates too).
• Vandalism would become even more prevalent. By the same principle as the last two, when you have more articles, it's harder to keep them free of vandalism. This is bad enough when it results only in us giving false information to the reader, but it's especially bad when it deals with living people. For example, during the last municipal election in my hometown, this was added to the article about the mayor. It was completely false, and I reverted it literally within a minute. But there are already plenty of articles about living people where something like that could have survived days, weeks, or even indefinitely, and that's going from being merely inaccurate (which is plenty bad enough) to actually defamatory.

• Last of all, you asked if it would be wise to hand this off to a different supporter of Mr. Lemas. I don't think that that's necessary, and I don't think it would be helpful in any event (after all, is there any reason a different major supporter of his would be more neutral than his campaign manager?). You do seem to have the right idea regarding neutrality, and if you confine yourself to what is verifiable and don't edit-war with any other editors who might come along and try to make it more neutral, you should be fine. Whenever I edit an article in which I have anything approximating a conflict of interest, I like to declare it on the article's talk page to that people can evaluate my edits in that context.

Whew - and you thought your post was long. As you've no doubt figured out by now, there is a lot more to Wikipedia than the popular conception of "anybody can write anything". Hopefully the above will help ease your transition into this world. As always, I'd be pleased to be of further assistance. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 08:39, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Hey OC - I see the article actually has been deleted now. Were you able to save a copy before it went down? If not, and you're still interested in trying to get it up to a keepable standard, I'd be happy to provide you with one. Also, for your edification, here's an example of an article on an unelected congressional candidate that I was barely comfortable keeping (although I suspect that many other editors, possibly even a consensus worth of them, will disagree with me). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 20:19, 18 March 2008 (UTC)