Talk:Michel Auger (politician)

Proposed deletion

I have proposed this article for deletion because I'm not convinced that it meets WP:N or WP:BIO. My specific concern here is that the article does not at present meet WP:BASIC. There are only two sources, and as official records of the same organisation, they are not intellectually independent. To meet WP:BASIC, multiple independent reliable sources are needed. If the problem with WP:BASIC can be fixed, there will be no problem with the article - it is clear that the subject will satisfy WP:NPOL.

• If you think my interpretation of WP:N and WP:BIO is wrong you can say why here and you can remove the proposed deletion tag.

• If you agree with me, but you can fix the problem, please do so and again remove the tag.

The Parson's Cat (talk) 18:41, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Removed the prod, the article clearly meets the standards of WP:NPOL, sorry Deville (Talk) 19:49, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

WP:NPOL does not guarantee notability. The Parson's Cat (talk) 20:09, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

If a politician has been elected to a national or state/provincial legislature, then they're a valid article topic, period, no exceptions. That's true for every country, not just Canada. We would certainly like more detail than just the fact that they served, so tagging this for possible expansion and reference improvement would be perfectly valid — but all an article about a politician has to do to be kept on here is to verify the fact that they held a seat in a notable legislature. Once that's been done, their basic notability is not up for any further debate, and the article may only be flagged for maintenance issues like needing additional references.

It's true that for some politicians, Wikipedians won't have actually done enough work to ref the article up to Wikipedia's "best practices" standards — this is especially true when the politician served in the 1880s and died in 1909, as Auger did. But that's not a uniquely Canadian problem either — there are plenty of British MPs and American congresscritters whose Wikipedia articles aren't actually any better-sourced than this one is. But there's a big difference between "sources are out there and just haven't been dug up yet" and "no sources exist anywhere in the world at all" — once a basic claim of notability that passes a Wikipedia inclusion guideline has been properly sourced as true, an article is not deletable unless you can prove the latter point.

The problem with applying subjective standards beyond the fact that they held a legislative seat is that it opens us up to a partisan war — i.e. "delete all members of X political party because I personally disapprove of {Nazis, communists, conservatives, liberals, Republicans, Tea Partiers, whining loony leftists, anti-monarchists, whatever}" — over who we should be including or excluding. So the only objectively neutral standard we can apply here is that an elected member of a notable legislature is always a valid article topic regardless of what any individual editor thinks about their record of accomplishment or lack thereof. Bearcat (talk) 17:16, 22 March 2014 (UTC)