Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alan Shefman (third nomination)

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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 of the debate was REDIRECT to Vaughan City Council. Although there appears to be no overall consensus it looks to me as if the parties that are most interested feel that a redirect is the best compromise. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 22:19, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Alan Shefman

This page should be deleted because it is a promotional page for a nn person. The top 3 Google hits for Alan Shefman are: the same Shefman's home page for his company, the Vaughan Ward 5 homepage, and this article. It doesn't help that his son is the main content editor, as per history. MSJapan 03:43, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

  • No Vote Fine, I have a conflict of interest here so I won't vote. That being said, we have already agreed in the past that all members of Vaughan Council are entitled to Wiki articles. I strongly encourage people to vote down this AfD as we are already in the process of adding the articles for other Vaughan Council Members. pm_shef 05:07, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alan Shefman (second nomination) came down to a keep, after the original Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alan Shefman was shut down due to an utterly absurd and out-of-control partisan bickering match that rather closely resembled what's beginning to unfold at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Simon Strelchik (and I wouldn't be overly surprised if that one involved some of the same people). Although I understand that not everybody is convinced that city councillors deserve articles, actual AFD precedent has tended to favour the view that they do...and I'm less than eager to start up a debate again, especially on an article that's already gone through this process and survived. I have to say speedy keep, if only on the grounds that there's no valid reason to revisit this yet again. And, frankly, I strongly suspect that the sole reason this was nominated at all was as a payback shot against pm_shef — there's no other conceivable reason for this to happen now. Bearcat 05:18, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
Comment: I'm not even Canadian, nor do I live there, and it's interesting that you ascribe this to a personal motive, because that tells me there's something going on that maybe shouldn't be, 'especially' since there's seems ot be a whole group on WP concerned with Vaughan politics, if the other AfDs are any indication. Anyhow, I happened to come across the name "pm_shef" on a talk page, clicked on it because it looked interesting, saw that said Shefman wrote an article about another Shefman, looked at the article, surmised the relationship (and was proven correct), saw non-notability and a conflict of interest, and thus requested the AfD. MSJapan 05:44, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
You'd be correct that there's something going on that shouldn't be. Review Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Simon Strelchik (and the constant vandalism of Talk:Simon Strelchik today by multiple brand-new editors) if you need background. See also past partisan foolishness at Susan Kadis. There's clearly some axe-grinding going on; for what it's worth, my interest in the discussion is limited to the fact that I'm a Wikipedia administrator who was involved in sorting all the bullshit out last time. Bearcat 05:48, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Speedy Delete to the entire City of Vaughan if it will end this endless debate on their no-name, non-notable city councillors. --Dogbreathcanada 05:37, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • IDEA-- perhaps instead of going through these AfD's every 3 months, we consolidate. We could get rid of the individual Vaughan Councilor pages and create one big Vaughan City Council page similar to Hamilton City Council, we could also expand that format, annotating the members names with short paragraphs detailing their previous career. There's even a Category for it Canadian City Councils. This probably isn't the place to have the discussion... but it could make everyone's lives a lot easier. pm_shef 05:59, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep, notability is good enough for me given positions with City Council, School board, library board, Human Rights League, and Ontario Commission on Whatnot. -Joshuapaquin 06:07, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Speedy Keep per precedent of prior AFD. And no, we shouldn't have a page for the Council, as we wouldn't be able to properly talk about non-council activity in such an article. Also, there's no precedent for every member Vaughan Council either. Also, generally, people wishing to do a renom, really need to give a good new reason. --Rob 06:13, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep, per previous debates. - SimonP 06:14, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete Non notable. Per WP:BIO WP:BLPand precidents, this is not a notable nor national office. Local officials are not inherently notable, and this person not notable for other reasons. Can anyone guess how many similar people there are in just English speaking countries?Obina 10:48, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete since city councillor is well below the levels per WP:BIO and there is no evidence of any other claim to notability. Obina is right on the money. Just zis Guy you know? 14:41, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep, if only in the name of the most basic fairness and because nominating this article for the third time in three months is excessive when the two previous consultations showed strong consensus for keeping the article. The first consultation showed 7 keep and 0 delete (discouting the anonymous user who voted four times) and the second showed 10 keep and 2 delete. I understand there's no limit to this and people can merrily continue to put up the same article for deletion again, and again, and again, and get their point on their thirty-sixth attempt when they have exhausted everyone. I also understand that the nominator was acting in good faith and seems to not have initially realized that this particular case had already been discussed at length and settled. Note that I have no particular interest in this debate and before today I had never even heard about the city of Vaughan. Actually, on the general principle I would agree with the nominator's reasoning, if we were to discuss a general rule or guideline. The mere fact for someone to be or to have been a city councillor is not in itself much of a claim to notability unless it is accompanied by some notable elements. But at the present time, the choice of this particular article for target in order to make a point is especially ill-chosen and especially unfair. People have actually been doing work in good faith in application of the previous decisions on this very case. Changing the decision now on a whim would be a waste of time both for the people who did that work and for the participants to the AfD discussions and would be detrimental to the trust and the cooperative spirit of the community. Therefore, if someone feels like proposing in the appropriate forums a discussion for explicit guidelines on the matter, let's do that, it's a good idea. Then we'll act according to whatever guidelines will have been agreed upon and for all similar articles. But until then, let's leave this article alone, there is no reason to single it out. It has earned some respite. Asclepias 03:22, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep, the last argument is fair. Two previous yes votes should settle the matter once and for all. Jameswilson 04:34, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep per SimonP. Ardenn 21:07, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep I am torn on the concept of city councillors being notable enough for articles, but it seems to me that any city larger than Prince Edward Island should be entitled to pages for its councillors as no one would question the notability of members of the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island. - Jord 22:51, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep per AfD precedent. Mangojuice 16:48, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong vote for Redirect to Vaughan City Council. This solution seems reasonable to the involved parties. It's too bad this all had to happen here on AfD: an example of when process fails us, maybe. It does seem a shame to lose all the information in this article, though, so I hope the article will simply be changed to a redirect rather than deleted. Mangojuice 14:15, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Delete This man is NOT notable. The Mayor of Vaughan has 2 or 3 sentences, though a veteran of Vaughan Council for 21 years; the local Councillor Alan Shefman, chosen in a by-election 13 months ago, has 2 pages.

Why? Because Alan Shefman's son is pm_shef and he is a staunch Liberal. Why do councillors Mario Ferri and Sandra Yeung Racco have two pages (before I shortened them today) and councillors Linda Jackson, Joyce Frustaglio, Peter Meffe, Tony Carella and Bernie di Vona have two lines? Because both Ferri and Racco are proclaimed Liberals, and everybody else is not; even Racco's spouse, Mario Racco, is a Liberal MPP. And being a Liberal seems to be the criteria for receiving glorified, self-promotional encyclopedia listings in Vaughan. And help from pm_shef .

To the admin reviewing this article, I plead with you - for the sake of objectivity, of encyclopedic integrity, remove this article and place it among the heap where over 5000 other councillors of Ontario are confined. *Delete VaughanWatch 04:45, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Then expand the other councillors' articles, sunshine. Nobody here has a responsibility to do the work for you; if you think something needs to be expanded, then expand it yourself. The only reason this guy has a longer article than the others is because somebody who knows something about him took the time to write it, not because anybody thinks he deserves special treatment. So if you know something about Joyce Frustaglio and Linda Jackson and Peter Meffe and the others, write them up. Bearcat 05:02, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
No, Bearcat. The point is that these profiles should not be expanded. I don't think it should be deleted, however, I believe it should be scaled back to a couple sentences. 70.29.239.249 05:33, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia does not have a maximum length restriction on articles. The only two choices available are "the article can be as long as it needs to be to cover what's encyclopedic about this topic", or "the article doesn't belong here at all". There's no provision for "this person can have an article, but they're not important enough to permit it to be longer than two lines". If they're not important enough to warrant whatever length of article can be written about them without dipping into trivia, then they shouldn't have articles at all.
Whether city councillors deserve articles or not has been a point of contention on AFD, with decisions in both directions. But it's not within your authority to dictate how long of an article these councillors deserve or don't deserve; they either get as long an article as somebody feels qualified and able to write, or they get nothing. Them's the rules. Bearcat 06:00, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Is their a process to remove biased administrators? 70.29.239.249 06:10, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
If you're alleging that an administrator has behaved in a biased manner, you can directly address your allegations with them. Otherwise, you can kindly stop with the ad hominem attacks and start providing specific details about what specific content you're actually disputing. Bearcat 06:24, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Clarification Basically, theirs two choices, either all incumbents and candidates articles should be deleted or all kept. No in betweens. I vote Keep but if one is deleted then they all should be Deleted both incumbents and candidates.--Eyeonvaughan 06:38, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Municipal incumbents, maybe; Wikipedia precedent on that question has been mixed. Municipal candidates, however, absolutely do not merit encyclopedia articles. Bearcat 06:41, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Is their consensus for the following: pm_shef the author of this article and the son of the subject, along with MSJapan and Mangojuice have suggested one central page, like Hamilton City Council, that should store all Council information. I have just created such a page: Vaughan_Council.

Here is what pm_shef has to say about this *Idea: "perhaps instead of going through these AfD's every 3 months, we consolidate. We could get rid of the individual Vaughan Councilor pages and create one big Vaughan City Council page similar to Hamilton City Council, we could also expand that format, annotating the members names with short paragraphs detailing their previous career. There's even a Category for it Canadian City Councils. This probably isn't the place to have the discussion... but it could make everyone's lives a lot easier."

We would then *Delete this page and add it to Vaughan_Council.

VaughanWatch 07:22, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

  • If people would agree to the deletion of all individual vaughan councillor articles (excluding the mayor) as well as candidate articles (which shouldn't be there in the first place), then I'll go along with that (since it was my idea anyways). pm_shef 16:33, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete As far as I can tell, fails these two applicable WP:BIO criteria: (1)Political figures holding international, national or statewide/provincewide office or members of a national, state or provincial legislature; (2) Major local political figures who receive significant press coverage. OhNoitsJamieTalk 18:59, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Redirect as per consensus on election talk page. OhNoitsJamieTalk 04:28, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Speedy delete No claim of notability; council member for Ward 5 is not one. . I may well express the same opinion on the other articles. Septentrionalis 19:39, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


Ok again it looks like we have consensus for deleting this page and all councillor pages except the mayor, but including councillor information on Vaughan_Council. Am I right? VaughanWatch 20:12, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I've tagged them all for deletion per Wikipedia:Proposed_deletion. If there is a consensus, no further action will need to be taken and the pages will be deleted in five days. OhNoitsJamieTalk 21:24, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
  • I tagged the councillors Ohnoitsjamie missed, all vaughan councillors (except the mayor) have now been tagged for WP:Prod and we can make the single council page. Glad this could be worked out. pm_shef 22:19, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Count me in favour of the merger; it strikes me as a positive solution to the dilemma. Bearcat 00:06, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
  • So according to user:TenOfAllTrades we shouldn't be deleting these, but redirecting them to the new amalgamated page... something about the license. So I guess whatever admin reviews this, if it could be kept please, so that we can turn it into a redirect.. pm_shef 00:10, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

speedy redirect everyone has come to a consensus that all vaughan councillorsand candidates are to be redirected. Why is this still up? when all the others has been redirected--Eyeonvaughan 04:21, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Comment Only an admin can end the afd early. The others had prod tags, which can be removed outside of a formal process. Anyone who is in agreement with the consensus can change their vote accordingly. OhNoitsJamieTalk 04:28, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Note User:Eyeonvaughan's continued blanking of a page currently undergoing AfD debate in contravention of WP policy. pm_shef 18:29, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Can an admin do their job and delete this thing? 70.29.239.249 20:48, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
  • The admins job is to decide on the consenus view when the proper time has elapsed, there is policy for this kind of thing, and WP policy needs to be respected. pm_shef 21:01, 3 March 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.