Talk:Shire of Banana

Merge from Robert Staines

I have done this. Kerry (talk) 22:57, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Really not a fan of these types of merges - this much detail on a short-term mayor is seriously irrelevant to this article, and so it mangles the article on the larger topic because people want to have it both ways in the deletion discussion - either he's notable or he isn't, but the content doesn't fit here. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:12, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Was going to post about the same thing but there is already a post (despite being 6 years old) - I'm a banana shire resident and I cant see why this guy who was mayor for seemingly one year is relevant enough to get such a large portion on the article, I've never even heard of him - It feels like someone who was related to him made it considering they praise him the whole time... Why not just remove his section entirely? AmNowEurovision (talk) 03:31, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

@AmNowEurovision: I see you are a new contributor, so let me explain some realities of Wikipedia. The content is written by volunteers, like you and me. All volunteers have their own areas of interest, yours are minor parties, mine are the history and geography of Queensland. And we all have topics about which we couldn't care less. For example, I am not particularly interested in sport. Wikipedia has rules about notability for what topics can have their own article in Wikipedia (which are very contested). But the rules of acceptable content within an article are more relaxed. Being relevant, accurate and cited are the relevant criteria for article content and I don't like it isn't a reason to delete content. In this case, someone wrote an article about Robert Staines (they were not a family member, their interest was biographies of alumni of a college and their contributions clearly reflected that). It was rejected as an article in its own right (being a mayor of a small town doesn't get you a Wikipedia article). However, if we just delete that article, the person who wrote it in good faith, a fellow volunteer, probably decides to stop contributing. We have a massive shortage of contributors, so it is important to try to find a way forward that keeps a productive volunteer continuing to contribute and not walk away in disgust. One solution is to merge the content of the deleted article into another relevant article. Biographies of local mayors are acceptable content in the article about their local government area. However, as this Shire of Banana article has had very little work on it, the Robert Staines content is disproportionately large (as you rightly observe). But again Wikipedia articles evolve over time and may have inconsistent level of detail on similar topics as part of that evolution process, so it is not a reason to remove this content because there is nothing on other mayors. It is always better to focus on adding content to articles than deleting content (unless it is unacceptable content under our policies), because deleting content tends to lead to volunteer demotivation. Every word in Wikipedia was written by someone; always remember there's a human being with feelings behind every word you delete. Kerry (talk) 23:48, 19 January 2023 (UTC)