User talk:Enos733/sandbox/Candidate notability

Some comments

I've previously drafted a notability guideline for politicians to expand on NPOL, at User:Bearcat/Whatever — however, my efforts to get feedback from other people on their thoughts didn't get very far, so the project kind of lost steam before I ever actually got to the "getting it formally endorsed for adoption as an official guideline" stage. That said, it would definitely be worth at least reading what I had written there, and we could potentially merge parts of both that and this into a single document if you're willing to collaborate on a comprehensive NPOL guideline.

When it comes to the situations where a candidate may be notable, it's also important to clarify the point that candidates are not deemed to permanently pass WP:GNG just because some campaign coverage exists per se, because every candidate in every election essentially always has that. So the generally accepted principle is that just having campaign coverage is not automatically enough per se: the candidate needs to have a credible reason why their candidacy is of such unusual significance, over and above most other candidates, that even if they lose the election (or die) and never again accomplish anything else more noteworthy than running in an election they didn't win, they would still pass the ten year test as somebody that a broad range of readers will still be looking for information about in the 2030s anyway.

"The candidate in a country with a bicameral legislature is running for a position in the most prestigious chamber (e.g. U.S. Senate) and has independent polling showing the candidate tied or ahead in the polls within four months of the election or multiple political prognosticators suggest the election is a "toss up" or leans toward the candidate." is a criterion I'm not comfortable with. It is entirely possible for polling to blip back and forth during the campaign, even "toss-up" elections are still invariably won by somebody in the end, and people really can and do sometimes lose races that were portrayed as "leaning or favoured" toward them during the campaign — so this would open us up to sometimes having to keep losing senate candidates just because they had a polling lead for a portion of the campaign. It certainly isn't considered standard practice now, and isn't a criterion I'd support adding to NPOL for the future.
While it is true that we have more articles about unsuccessful Senate candidates than we do about unsuccessful House candidates, this has nothing to do with the real reason why. Rather, it's just that by virtue of having to win a statewide primary instead of just a local district primary, Senate candidates are somewhat more likely to clear one of the "is notable" bars (having already held another NPOL-passing office before running for Senate, having preexisting notability in another field prior to entering politics as a Senate candidate) than House candidates are. Simply put, Senate candidates are somewhat more likely to have already been House members, state legislators, or notable businesspeople or writers or filmmakers, whereas political novices with no preexisting notability are much more likely to run for House seats than to jump straight into or actually win a Senate primary.

The candidate defeated an incumbent in a party primary for a national office. I don't know if this is necessarily always grounds for a Wikipedia article per se. In the case of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, for example, just defeating an incumbent in a primary wasn't the definitive thing that got her kept while she was still just a candidate — rather, what actually tipped the bar was that she got so much national and international coverage for it that she was already one of the ten most famous American politicians on the entire planet. Seriously, non-Americans who couldn't name you five other US House or Senate candidates if they tried still knew about AOC. And besides, AOC won her election and passed NPOL as a congresswoman, so the fact that her article got created and kept before she had actually won yet isn't a useful precedent for why we should potentially have to keep an article about a candidate who defeated an incumbent in a party primary but then went on to lose the general election.

Candidates who are not notable and are running for an office that meets WP:NPOL should be redirected to into lists of campaign hopefuls, such as Ontario New Democratic Party candidates in the 1995 Ontario provincial election, or into articles detailing the specific race in question, such as 2010 United States Senate election in Nevada. I would note here that at least in Canada, the editor commitment to actually creating candidate lists has effectively evaporated — while we still have historical lists that were created in the 2000s and early 2010s, there generally hasn't been any effort to start or maintain such lists for elections that have happened since 2015. (And even before 2015, they generally only existed for federal and Ontario elections, and there was never very much commitment to compiling lists of that type for other provinces besides Ontario.) I remain of the opinion that the Canadian candidate lists should just be deleted as no longer useful at all, because (a) there's been absolutely no serious effort to clean up the older mini-bio lists for compliance with the rule tightening, and (b) a rule-compliant list no longer offers any real information that a reader isn't already getting from the results table in the main election article anyway, but my past efforts to get them deleted have always just landed no-consensus rather than either getting the pages deleted or establishing a consensus that there was value in them. But at the very least, they probably shouldn't be held up as an example of what we should be aspiring to, because at best they're a zombie remnant of a dumb idea from 2003 rather than a Wikipedia best practice.

Candidates who win their election but do not assume office (that meets WP:NPOL) are generally kept. This should probably clarify that this only applies to the certified winner of the election, and does not apply to people who are initially declared the winner by the media on election night but then found to have lost once all the ballots were counted or recounted in advance of certification.

I'll add more thoughts later on if something else occurs to me. But for now, that's the two cents I have in my wallet at the moment. Bearcat (talk) 14:08, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Bearcat, I am very happy to collaborate - and my initial thought would be this is added to WP:POLOUTCOMES, but could end up anywhere. Some quick responses to your comments. Polls - this is in response to the Teresa Greenfield discussion. In many cases, this is the type of candidate that often gets kept, regardless of what the community's general guidance says. This is also the type of candidate where we spend most of our time discussing which standard applies. Party primary while this may be seen as the AOC response, I think that (for federal candidates), the community feels that defeating an incumbent is significant (and usually leads to greater coverage). Redirected - this is the current language in WP:POLOUTCOMES. Assume office - good catch. --Enos733 (talk) 15:24, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Theresa Greenfield was much more an exception to the rule than any sort of precedent or standard practice. It's important to remember that deletion discussions conducted during the peak of an election campaign have sometimes ended up being overwhelmed by a rush of participants who confused temporary newsiness for "readers will still be looking for this person a decade from now" notability, making it impossible to close the discussion in accordance with actual consensus — so just because you can point to an example of an AFD discussion being decided that way doesn't mean there's any established consensus that leading the polls at some point in the election campaign is always or even usually accepted as a permanent notability claim in and of itself for a person who lost the election in the end. Bearcat (talk) 18:06, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Bearcat, I don't disagree with you. I have found it is often not worth the effort to move to delete high-profile candidates during the middle of an election campaign, even if the policy or consensus would suggest delete. My attempt here is to provide something to point to that can serve as a line separating all candidates and those candidates who are often kept, recognizing that if a candidate loses, they can be subsequently redirected. --Enos733 (talk) 20:43, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]