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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 redirect to United States House of Representatives elections in Pennsylvania, 2018#District 7 , at least until the result of the election is announced. – Joe (talk) 20:23, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Mary Gay Scanlon

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Mary Gay Scanlon (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Fails WP:NPOL and per WP:POLOUTCOMES. She's a candidate, not an elected official. It's WP:TOOSOON. There are also significant concerns with neutrality here--those can be addressed, but at the end of the day, there aren't enough independent sources about her, as opposed to the campaign, to meet WP:GNG. Marquardtika (talk) 20:12, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 21:19, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Pennsylvania-related deletion discussions. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 21:19, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to United States House of Representatives elections in Pennsylvania, 2018#District 7. No SNOW here. Subject has a couple sources listed above (is the Penn Law Journal useful for notability?) but the vast majority of coverage is WP:ROUTINE relating to the election, not her. She could win, which would make her notable, but we're two months from knowing, so it's WP:TOOSOON. – Muboshgu (talk) 21:31, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Not sure if you read the articles (which is understanable, since theres some dead links) but most of the campaign coverage is anything but ROUTINE. FiveThirtyEight gives Scanlon a 99 percent chance of being elected, so yeah, theres that. Plus, WP:NPOL states "Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the primary notability criterion of "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject of the article"." This has significant coverage. ~EDDY (talk/contribs)~ 22:51, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • I looked at what I could, and I disagree with your assessment. – Muboshgu (talk) 00:52, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • Wikipedia does not deal in the realm of election predictions. The fact that one or more election prediction models deem a candidate as favoured to win does not constitute a notability claim — candidates who are "favoured" to win can still lose (Hillary Clinton would be president of the United States right now if "favoured to win" always led to actually winning), or withdraw from the ballot for personal or professional or scandal reasons, or even die, and in some elections different pundits can and do publish conflicting claims about which candidate is "favoured". So the notability test is not "somebody has predicted that they're likely to win the seat" — it's "the election is over and she's been declared the winner of the actual votes cast". Bearcat (talk) 17:03, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
        • Hillary Clinton did not have a 99% chance to win, it was something like 72%. All the models agree that Scanlon is the heavy favorite, and yet people want to know who they are voting for -- official websites are not always the best sources. Also, the notability test is not if the election is over and they've won, it's is there enough sources to meet GNG. And in this case, the answer is yes, see [4] [5] [6]. Just because they are about the campaign doesn't mean they should be discounted. ~EDDY (talk/contribs)~ 02:31, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Every single candidate in every single election everywhere can always claim that "there are enough sources to meet GNG and therefore exempt them from having to pass NPOL". So "some campaign coverage exists" does not automatically equal "passes GNG in lieu of NPOL", because every candidate in any election would always get that pass — the only way campaign coverage of a non-winning candidate actually gets over GNG as an alternative to passing NPOL is if her candidacy has already made her so (inter)nationally "Christine O'Donnell or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez" famous that even if she loses the election she'll still pass the people will still be looking for this article ten years from now test anyway. Absent that level of hypersignificance attaching to the candidacy, the notability test for any other candidate is that she has to win the election first. Bearcat (talk) 03:44, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
People have to win elections and thereby hold seats to be deemed notable as politicians, not just be candidates for seats. Bearcat (talk) 16:56, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Bearcat: Winning is not required. WP:NPOL also includes:
Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage.[8]
[8] ...A politician who has received "significant press coverage" has been written about, in depth, independently in multiple news feature articles, by journalists.
If you are arguing that it does not meet this second standard, that's a reasonable position. I believe it meets the standard. --David Tornheim (talk) 02:52, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
"Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage" does not cover off unelected candidates for offices that would otherwise fall under NPOL #1 — it covers mayors and city councillors and county executives, not candidates for anything. And even if we waived that and applied it to unelected candidates, every candidate in every election always receives enough campaign coverage to claim that they pass it — so passing it is not a question of "some campaign coverage exists", but of "so bloody much campaign coverage exists that she has a credible claim to being a special case over and above most other candidates". Bearcat (talk) 03:50, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
What evidence do you have that, ""Major local political figures who have received significant press coverage" does not cover off unelected candidates"? That does not sound right at all. As far as I am concerned candidates ARE political figures. In fact, I see no reason to not have coverage of candidates that have "significant" coverage. Sometimes, I have found Wikipedia a far better and more WP:NPOV resource for election material than all the junk mail, phone calls and supposedly neutral material we get during an election. I used the material I found there to choose my vote for Mayor. The material I found that was so helpful was about a leading candidate who had never held office before the election. I think it is a great disservice to the public who wants and needs this information to make it so much harder to obtain it by deleting (or redirecting) articles about major candidates when WP:RS exists. --David Tornheim (talk) 04:08, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I was involved in the initial creation and writing of NPOL in the first place, for starters — so I know very well what it's supposed to cover, and NPOL #2 most certainly was meant to cover off mayors and city councillors, and not to provide congressional or state legislature candidates with a "get out of NPOL #1 free" card. And you'll find that the corpus of past AFD discussions on politicians also supports my statement — NPOL #2 is not applied to candidates for state or federal offices, but to holders of municipal offices. And at any rate, in reality, Wikipedia articles about political officeholders or hopefuls do routinely turn into electioneering bumf as bad as all the junk mail and phone calls, because we have zero mechanisms to prevent their campaign manager from overwriting the whole thing with a blatant campaign brochure, or even worse than the junk mail and phone calls, because we also have zero mechanisms to prevent their opponent's campaign manager from dirtwashing the whole thing with a pile of libel — which is precisely one of the reasons that we expressly limit NPOL notability to officeholders rather than candidates, because we simply don't have the resources to properly manage and monitor and disinfect articles about tens of thousands of aspiring candidates per election cycle. And another reason is that notability is not temporary — a person cannot be "notable for now because he's a candidate, and then we'll delete him if he loses", but rather must already have a strong and permanent claim to "notable forever" before an article is allowed to be started at all. So Wikipedia has expressly decided that providing voters with information about prospective candidates is not our job — that's what Ballotpedia is for, while Wikipedia's job is to cover the holders of notable political offices and not every person who merely aspires to become one. Bearcat (talk) 04:23, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the lengthy explanation. If you can give links to discussions that created the WP:NPOL language that interpret it the way you describe that would be helpful. The plain language of WP:NPOL "statute" does not make that clear. As for "case-law" of prior AfD's, I'm not familiar with those either. Examples of that would be helpful too. (It would be really nice if we had something equivalent to Annotation#Law annotated statutes for our policies, guidelines, etc. and cases that apply them.)
I do agree with you that it is a lot of work to deal with campaigns trying to write WP:PROMO or trash their opponent, even long after the election or their service in office. And I am aware of these campaigns getting caught doing so. I have definitely seen that before! --David Tornheim (talk) 04:58, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect. People have to win the election, not just run in it, to be guaranteed a spot in Wikipedia as politicians — and as I've pointed out above, a candidate's presumed or predicted likelihood of winning is not an inclusion criterion either. But the depth and breadth and range of coverage shown here is not enough to get her over WP:GNG as a special case whose candidacy is somehow more notable than everybody else's candidacy, because it simply falls right in line with what every candidate in every election could always routinely show. If she does win, then she'll be eligible for an article after election day — but nothing here is a strong or compelling reason why she would already qualify for an article two months before election day. Bearcat (talk) 17:07, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, that is true that they need to win an election to be guaranteed a spot in Wikipedia, but this is one of the cases where she deserves an article anyway. It is completely untrue that this is the type of coverage any candidate would receive -- many candidates only have a routine article about them running, while there are multiple articles on Mary Gay's bio. No reason to wait two months when the pieces are here for an article. In the off chance she has to resign as a candidate due to a scandal or whatever, she would still be notable due to the ensuing press coverage. ~EDDY (talk/contribs)~ 02:31, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete and redirect Fails WP:NPOL. Long-standing, sensible consensus is that Wikipedia is not a repository for campaign brochures. She has simply not received significant coverage outside of her political candidacy. Other than a single mention in a specialist law publication, articles cited by keep advocates are literally solely about her candidacy for office. AusLondonder (talk) 02:52, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to United States House of Representatives elections in Pennsylvania, 2018#District 7. That is the appropriate place for NPOV content about this election including content on all of the candidates. For those who think that her chance of victory is 99%, please realize that if she wins, the chance of this article being restored is 100%. But we really need to follow our standard procedures. If we ignore our notabilty guideline regarding unelected politicical candidates, and ignore past precedent at AfD, then this encyclopedia rapidly becomes a repository for tens of thousands of campaign brochures posing as faux encyclopedia articles. This is an intolerable burden on our volunteer editors. If she wins, there will be an article. Don't rush it. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 04:23, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • We are not ignoring our notability guidelines, nowhere in the guidelines does it say that an unelected candidate is NOT notable. I ask again, why are articles on the campaign considered unusable? And since when did the precedent arise that candidates aren't notable until the election? I suppose we could merge the content into the election article but that would be WP:UNDUE weight. Also, the assertion that if we keep this, then the encyclopedia will become a repository of campaign brochures is a WP:SLIPPERYSLOPE argument and fails basic logical principles. ~EDDY (talk/contribs)~ 15:09, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep as a notable lawyer - notable case, tax commisison vice chair, school board member, etc. I would go along with a redirect instead. Bearian (talk) 00:55, 12 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Bearian: She's not a notable lawyer though. Her history isn't significantly more distinguished than many lawyers without wikipedia articles, and the only source supporting her legal history is her firm's own webpage. There's nothing constituting notable coverage of her legal career except a few mentions of it in election campaign news. If every tax commission vice chair and school board member got a wikipedia article it'd be loony. Zortwort (talk) 01:06, 12 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect, noting that editors are free to save the text and bring it back if she wins in November. I searched for notability (news archive search set to show oldest articles first), and saw articles going back as far as 1992 (mostly in the Inky) that mentioned or quoted her, many on school related issues and cases. I did not find profiles, and - scanning - nothing looked sufficiently INDEPTH to claim pre-campaign notability, nor did there appear to be any single accomplishment that does so. Feel free to ping me to reconsider if someone finds such coverage.E.M.Gregory (talk) 12:11, 13 September 2018 (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.
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