Talk:Harry Welty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This page has already had some notability issues (see the 2006 discussion below). The content started out under this name space and the content and history (without this discussion) was moved to a new page as Minnesota's 8th congressional district election, 2006 where a blurb about the election was tacked onto the front of this content... where it made very very little sense as "a small but reasonably well written bio dangling off an election stub". The only thing left for that page is the little blurb, slightly rewritten to put it in the past tense and explain why the election was other than a run of the mill "expected winner, wins" election.

Just to forestall some of the problems (I think?), the notability claims stem from Mr. Welty's coverage by the Duluth Union Tribune over the years (a quote from them is included, but he's been the subject of other articles than the one quoted), his body of published columns in another newspaper, and his affiliation with Unity08 as a "famous first". It does not stem from his federal political candidacies because he lost all those elections (though he's won other local elections) and failed candidacies aren't notable.

-JenniferForUnity 22:11, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 2006 Discussion

So I obviously missed out on some kind of vote for lack of paying attention to wikipedia for a bit but my basic position is that I think this article should be moved back to "Harry Welty" and if there are notability problems with Harry Welty then they can be dealt with independently. I tend to do wiki stuff more on the scale of weeks and months instead of days and wish that the notability issue had been allowed to just "be there" for a couple weeks before anything was done about it because I think Mr. Welty is notable on a local scale if not on a national scale. I can go dig up newspaper articles about him (rather than by him, as he's a published columnist) if there's a concern that he's not been written about sufficiently to work with the notability concern. Basically, I think the move was not justified and should be undone. - JenniferForUnity 22:42, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

This is an excellent place to discuss notability, and whether Welty is sufficiently notable to justify an article of his own. I moved the page to Minnesota 8th congressional district election, 2006 but it seem quite clear that if I did not, someone was likely to recommend the page for deletion, possibly even speedy deletion.

The applicable criteria is at Wikipedia:Notability (people). I suggest reviewing that; I note that there is no distinction between "local" notability as opposed to "national" notability.

You also always have the option of simply copying the information on the Minnesota 8th congressional district election, 2006 page to the Harry Welty page (that is, essentially overwriting the redirect), and adding a link to Minnesota 8th congressional district election, 2006. I'd prefer that to a move, because I think the page history is more likely to survive at the page with the Congressional race than at the biographical page.

And you certainly have the option to do some research about him, so that the article can be expanded, before you change the redirect to a full article. I strongly suggest you do so, because the article, as is, clearly fails the notability test, and once a subject has been deleted, it is (in my opinion) more difficult to convince people at a later date that the article (even though expanded) should be resurrected. (In other words, nothing has been lost, to date, and there isn't any urgency, I think, to recreating the article via either copy/paste or a move.) John Broughton | Talk 01:09, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

I wrote the first thing, then worked on the article a bit and not I'm writing this... Maybe this isn't appreciated, but rather than saying "this is a stub, let's fold it into other content" as per Wikipedia:Candidates and elections I tried actually expanding the stub with some citations about Harry Welty pulled from the news and previous election results. I admit acording to some people he's a crackpot (I added a quote from the Duluth Union Tribune to that effect) but he's been losing local elections in Duluth for a long time in a way that's made him "more famous than your average college professor" which I remember seeing on a generic "biographic notability" writeup somewhere. Plus... the Unity08 thing could turn him into a meaningfully large name in the next 24 months. Why not wait 2 years to see if Harry Welty doesn't really deserve a named article?

In the meantime, the election itself seems (to me anyway) like really trivial content... the only reason it would be meaningful is as a touchstone in the arc of a politician or organization in which case it would be listed on their respective pages, preferably with a link to the raw source (like the links to the Secretary of State pages I gave for some of Mr. Welty's other races). - JenniferForUnity 01:21, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

As you pointed out, I've been following Wikipedia:Candidates and elections; the congressional race article also states that. Part of the confusion is that the talk page for the campaign article was, incorrectly, a redirect to this page. I've changed that; the template on the campaign talk page now explains that the campaign article is expected to be expanded.

So while the campaign article may be a convenient place to improve the article on Welty, that needs to be a temporary thing at best - when the article gets rewritten to really be about the entire campaign, the space devoted to Welty is going to be fairly small.

Regarding Why not wait 2 years to see if Harry Welty doesn't really deserve a named article, I believe the relevant policy is Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. John Broughton | Talk 13:30, 6 December 2006 (UTC)