Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Edmonton Election Pages

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The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Contents

[edit] Statements by users

[edit] User:DESiegel

User:Sarcasticidealist has created a number of pages on local elections in Edmonton. I believe that purely local elections are not generally notable, except where there is some particular circumstance that garners wider attention and makes them notable. I think that having such a large number of articles on topics of, at best, marginal notability, is not a good idea. If every incorporated municipality in the world (there must be tens of thousands just in the US) has an article on every election (possibly annually for a hundred years or more) we are talking about millions of potential articles. That seems excessive and a matter of undue weight to me. But it is possible that some of this information, at least the winning and losing candidates, might be useful to some readers. perhaps a merge would be proper, or perhaps a combined work of this data would be welcome at Wikibooks with a link from the Edmonton article.

I have created this RFC page in an attempt to get wider consensus on how to deal with these articles, and with possible similar article about other local elections. I am doing this as an alternative to a mass AfD, which might be clumsy. DES (talk) 20:53, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] User:Sarcasticidealist

I believe that individual municipal elections in Edmonton pass WP:N. I make the following arguments in support of my belief: 1. Any given election in Edmonton receives very significant coverage from a wide variety of media sources in Edmonton in the period leading up to and after the election in question, relatively significant coverage from other Canadian media in the same period, and small but significant coverage from the writings of local historians and political scientists in ensuing years (admittedly few of these latter writings are available online, but I would cite this as one example that is). City Politics, Canada is one example of a book that I happen to own that deals with specific past municipal elections in Edmonton. The existence of this sort of work allows us to distinguish between municipalities whose elections are notable and those whose elections aren't, which will prevent us from dealing with elections for every municipality in the world. 2. Edmonton is a municipality of more than one million people. There are many smaller jurisdictions (Guyana, Prince Edward Island, and Windsor, Ontario to take just a few examples) that have pages for their individual elections. While I agree with the authors of WP:AADD that the existence of a given article does not necessarily legitimize the existence of all comparable articles, I think that, in cases like this where no clear notability guideline exists, we need to consider the consequence to other established articles of our decisions. If we determine that Edmonton elections are insufficiently notable, I think it does call into question the justification for individual pages on PEI's elections, for example, and I don't think we should proceed with deleting the Edmonton articles unless we're either prepared to do the same with PEI and Guyana or we can come up with a clear justification for why they should stay when Edmonton shouldn't. 3. User:DESiegel suggested on my talk page that allowing articles on municipal elections will make Wikipedia "groan under the load". With respect, I don't believe that this is so. As long as articles have distinct names that don't require a lot of new disambiguation pages - an objective that should be easy to achieve - I see no reason why there couldn't be articles on individual elections for all major municipalities. 4. We have been discussing some possibilities for compromise. User:DESiegel suggested merging them into master articles, perhaps by decade. If we're going to have the information on Wikipedia, we need to figure out in what form it's going to be most useful to the user (other considerations that might otherwise have to be considered, such as "using up" article names that might be more useful on other subjects, are mercifully absent here, since I can't imagine any other articles being confused with Edmonton municipal election, 1941). Given the sheer volume of information, I would think that most users would prefer to have the information sorted in a rational way (by date) among different articles, instead of having one massive article with all of the information (in which the various sets of election results would also look very similar to one another, thereby possibly breeding confusion as to exactly what section a user was reading at any given time). 5. An suggestion for partial compromise that I made is that all articles on Edmonton elections after 1968, when all municipal elections in Alberta began to be held on the same day, be in larger articles of the format Alberta municipal elections, 1968 which would include all of the 1968 municipal elections in Alberta, since these could be seen as part of a larger (more notable) event in a way that elections prior to 1968 couldn't be.Sarcasticidealist 21:19, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] General discussion

Any interested users please discuss the matter in this section in hopes of reaching a consensus. Thank you.

  • I selected a few of these articles to look at. I can see how this material might be interesting to some people. Even I, a casual passer-by to this topic, found it interesting to see the date of the election moving, special elections being called, etc. I am concerned that none of the articles I visited cite their source(s), but that is a matter of sourcing, not notability. The page author asserts above the sources do exist for this material. That twin facts that someone off Wikipedia has written about these topics and the fact that someone on Wikipedia has taken the time to write the articles certainly seems to imply there is an audience for this material.
Some of the more interesting facts might come out more strongly with some sort of merge to allow trends or repeated themes to be spotted without visiting many separate articles. Or perhaps a summary article is needed.
If this were at AfD, I would post Keep, with no bias against possible merging. Johntex\talk 13:51, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
  • These are great articles, and I look forward to the series being completed. I came across this RFC while I was searching for some data on more recent Edmonton campaigns. I was disappointed to find that we do not yet have this information anywhere in the encyclopedia, but it is good to see that someone is working to fill these gaps. - SimonP 15:35, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Specific articles involved

The articles in question are included in Cat:Elections in Edmonton and linked to in {{Edmonton elections}}. The actual articles, at the moment, are:

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.