Talk:Michael Towke

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[edit] Stubbing of this article

I was contacted by someone who came across this article, was very concerned about it and asked me to review its compliance with our policies, namely, biographies of living people policy, Neutral point of view policy, undue weight and possibly Notability. I was rather shocked to discover that it was essentially a long, partisan attack article, rather than an encyclopedic biography about a living man. I feel this article was a blatant violation of policy and as such, and per BLP, I have stubbed it back to a basic bio. I am going to ask for another administrator to review the earlier version, current version and my actions. Thia article needs to be carefully rebuilt so we can make sure that everything that goes into is properly sourced and verified to reliable sources and is fully compliant with BLP. If, after a reasonable time, this isn't done and notability cannot be established, we will have to delete it. And so it would be really good if the people who wrote this article can help establish notability or whether this is just a partisan sideshow that should be deleted. Sarah 20:49, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I've looked into this one and agree with the concerns raised by Sarah above. The original version made very serious allegations which seemed like a WP:BLP case, and practically demonised the guy based on sensational claims (I tend to favour the approach taken by WP:RS that "exceptional claims require exceptional sources", and given this hasn't been to court or reviewed by a government committee, it's very difficult to establish facts clearly from a few spare news reports over a very short period of time.) As WP:N specifically covers elected MPs but not candidates (quite a few candidates have been deleted on AfD before - see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gavin Priestley as one example), and Towke is no longer even a candidate, I'm not sure under what claim notability could be made. Given the situation received significant media coverage, but only from the point of view of the candidature, it would appear the best place for this information would be Division of Cook. Orderinchaos 21:11, 9 October 2007 (UTC)