Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James Marcinkowski

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 keep. Kimchi.sg 08:19, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] James Marcinkowski

James Marcinkowski (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

James Marcinkowski was an unsuccessful candidate for Michigan's 8th congressional district. As per WP:C&E, it is preferable for articles created for congressional campaigns to be removed and included under an article about the campaign, which has been created at Michigan 8th congressional district election, 2006. Contents of the Marcinkowski article have been copied to the destination article for future revising. The debate is whether Marcinkowski represents a notable person in his own right, outside of the congressional race, as per WP:BLP guidelines. It should be noted that Marcinkowski did not have an article until his run for Congress, and that the majority of the article's content comes from his Congressional campaign. Jeff 23:22, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Comment: the statement that "Marcinkowski did not have an article until his run for Congress" is false, as I noted below. His article was created in the wake of his testimony to the Senate in July 2005.- csloat 00:24, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Comment: Good call. Ok, modify it to "having a stub until he ran for congress at which point his campaign filled in the article" -- Fair disclosure: I voted for Marcinkowski in the general election. --Jeff 00:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

• Keep. Marcinkowski had a bio page up before he announced his run for Congress. As you can see here, it was active in 2005 (though barely a stub). Unfortunately someone moved the page without consensus to Michigan 8th congressional district election, 2006 instead of AfDing it first, so the link I gave has the wrong page title. In any case, Marcinkowski was known for his work with the CIA and for his outspoken response to the Plame affair. He testified about it to the Senate well before his unsuccessful congressional run. Prior to that, he was known for prosecuting suicide Dr. Kevorkian when he was a prosecutor in Michigan. He may not be the most well-known person to ever run for Congress, but he is not an unknown, and his congressional run was not the only reason he was considered notable enough for a BLP. His testimony to the Senate committee is here; David Corn called it "perhaps the most powerful rebuttal of and rebuke" of the testimony that day; the testimony is quoted in numerous places, including Todd Gitlin's book The Intellectuals and the Flag excerpted in The American Prospect.--csloat 00:22, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Comment: Marcinkowski is not mentioned by name in the Plame Affair article or the Jack Kevorkian article. I think though your "keep" argument is certainly the synopsis of the other side of this debate! Looking forward to more outside opinion. --Jeff 00:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Aside: That can easily be fixed by editing the Plame Affair article or the Jack Kevorkian article :)-csloat 00:56, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

• Comment If you're merging the content into another article, why not just turn it into a redirect? That doesn't require afd, makes the information easier to find, and preserves the page history needed for GFDL. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 03:26, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Comment That's what was done, but csloat objected and wanted an AfD... So I went ahead and started the AfD request. Guess it probably could've just been a merge discussion back at the article, but I'm not really the best bureaucrat. --Jeff 06:05, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

The prob with redirecting is that it turned a biography into a page about a historical event.--csloat 07:26, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

If a person is only included because of one event, and the only thing worth writing about them is in relation to that one event, it's logical to redirect their name to that one event. The question of whether this guy has notability other than the election is a content dispute, and not an issue that needs to be brought to AFD. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 07:41, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

The question of whether this guy has notability other than the election is a content dispute, and not an issue that needs to be brought to AFD. Odd, I thought that the point of AfDs was to determine notability, and that "content dispute" occurs when editors agree on notability but disagree on wording. John Broughton | Talk 14:13, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Nevertheless, I agree that simply moving the article was a bad idea. An article about an election needs a fundamentally different structure from a biography and we'd be better off with a decent article written from scratch to cover the election (or just a paragraph in the page on the district). This is really a mess. User:John Broughton's move has made things way screwy. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 07:46, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

With all due respect, the article on the campaign - Michigan 8th congressional district election, 2006 specifically says the information below [which is about Marcinkowski] will be edited down and will become part of a full article about this race. My intent is to turn that draft into a decent article - in fact, I'm setting up a wikiproject to recruit editors for this and a number of other races. While I'd love to be able to instantly create a complete article for the Michigan 8th race, I'm putting most of my efforts into the wikiproject, which hopefully will result in almost 100 good articles about House races in 2006.

I hope you won't use the same methods to create the rest of the articles; these moves just lead to a mess. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:00, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I did 15 or so of these moves, trying to be judicious - almost all the articles were short and the candidates clearly non-notable. This one was probably the longest and the most "on the cusp"; with hindsight, I probably wouldn't have done what I did, despite WP:BB. I do note that no one has objected to any of the other moves, as far as I know. John Broughton | Talk 21:17, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

And my move didn't make things "way screwy" - what made things "screwy" was the copy/paste done by Commodore Sloat; he could have just done a move to put the article back where it was. Or he could have asked me about my move, and I could have told him him how to reverse it. John Broughton | Talk 14:13, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

The more I look at this the worse it gets. The election article needs to be moved back to the guy's name to restore the history. This should be deleted for housekeeping as a copy-paste move, but with care to merge any new content with the moved over copy. I pity the admin who has to sort this out. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 07:50, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to post a note on the discussion page of James Marcinkowski saying that the page history and prior versions of the article are available at Michigan 8th congressional district election, 2006, for those who want to look at those. And someone looking at the page history can also figure that out, since the oldest entry is a move. As for getting an admin involved - perhaps the AfD should be finished, first, since there is a disagreement here about whether Marcinkowski deserves an article or not? John Broughton | Talk 14:13, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

• Keep as per csloat above -- Sholom 15:06, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Notable and certainly verifiable. Note that the high-traffic election site www.electoral-vote.com started linking to our articles on both incumbents AND challengers for congressional seats this year; it's a sign that coverage of congressional challengers here is already EXPECTED by the world outside Wikipedia. Unfocused 07:45, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached
 Please add new discussions below this notice. Thanks, W.marsh 01:34, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

• The AfD template was removed from the article a few hours after the AfD started and never replaced, I am adding it and relisting, just to err on the side of caution. --W.marsh 01:34, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

• keep though not notable merely as a political candidate, his involvement in both the Kevorkian and Plame issues seems to establish notability through other means easily. --Jayron32 05:43, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
• Keep csloat covered my views well. --Falcorian ^(talk) 07:09, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. 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.