Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Steven Slater

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete.

I have not even tried to count the number of "keeps" and "deletes" in this discussion. It appears to be roughly even, perhaps with slightly more keeps. But given that (a) consensus is not a vote; and (b) this debate has been unduly affected by a large number of poorly reasoned "votes", counting is not helpful.

Consensus is particularly not a vote when there are policies (as opposed to inclusion guidelines) that affect the discussion. This is the case here. WP:BLP1E is part of our biographies of living persons policy. WP:NOTNEWS is also a policy that goes to the fundamentals of what the project is, by defining what it is not. These policies were raised consistently by those who argued to delete the article such that there was one clear reason to delete that underpinned just about all of the delete !votes. The arguments were cogent and persuasive.

On the keep side, various arguments for retention were used. First, it was argued that there was sufficient coverage in reliable sources. Those arguments need to be given less weight because they fail to recognise that notability-based reasons for inclusion are subject to overriding policies like BLP1E and NOTNEWS. Second, analogies were drawn to other articles that had been kept. These opinions also have to be given less weight: for every "similar" keep there have been notable "similar" deletes. Every article is different. That's why we have AfD.

The more compelling keep arguments were those that attempted to show that the article surmounted BLP1E and NOTNEWS, thus directly addressing the core concern of the delete !voters. There were two strands here. Early in the debate, some argued that Slater would remain significant over time. Clearly, that crystal balling should be given little weight. The second strand, later in the debate, was that the coverage of the incident surpassed BLP1E. Ultimately, I don't think this argument was made with sufficient strength, or had sufficient support, to stand in the way of the policy-based consensus to delete the article. The arguments to keep struggled to get beyond the assertion that "massive amounts of news coverage" gets an article past BLP1E.

Accordingly, there was one core policy-based reason to delete against fairly scattered arguments to keep of varying natures and (often low) weight. When viewed objectively, the consensus in the debate - based on an analysis of the arguments and applicable policies as opposed to headcounting - was to delete. And I stress the word objective: I have no problem with the article personally, but when assessing the strength of the arguments here objectively, the result seems clear.

I recognise this will be a close that will disappoint people. Anyone who wishes to appeal this decision to deletion review can feel free to bypass questioning the close on my talk page. Thank you to everyone for an interesting discussion. Mkativerata (talk) 03:35, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]