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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 was delete. ~65kb of text between two participants can obscure what is a fairly clear consensus that McHugh lacks notability. With-in that there is lots of discussion about whether NPOL is an alternative to or shortcut of GNG (my take is that NPOL pretty explicitly says it serves as a shortcut to GNG unlike some SNGs where are actually alternatives) and discussion about the Irish media landscape. Ultimately despite the detail of the case put forward to suggest notability there is not consensus among participating editors that the sources and interpretations offered to suggest notability do so - indeed multiple participants who suggest deletion explicitly reject both NPOL and GNG. While there were minimal !votes after the case for keep was presented there was ample discussion over a enough time (more than 3 days) and so there was a chance for previous !voters to switch their positions or for more new participants to validate it. And while sometimes a well-written keep after several deletes can be a reason for a relist, there was ample discussion by multiple editors of that case which would, on its, own lead to no consensus. However, those were not the only participants and the participation of the other 9 editors (including 1 editor favoring keep) from before that keep case was presented (plus the nominator) also deserves weight which is how I find that there is a clear delete consensus here. Barkeep49 ( talk) 02:46, 15 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Saoirse McHugh

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Saoirse McHugh (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)
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WP:NPOL. An unsuccessful candidate at 3 elections in 2019–20. She did say one thing in the 2020 Irish general election which got a modicum of coverage for being off-message. jnestorius( talk) 11:23, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply

  • keep Satisfies GNG regardless of her lack of success at the ballot box. She is a controversial figure and this has generated significant, sustained covered in national newspapers. A simple WP:BEFORE Google News search would have indicated as much. AugusteBlanqui ( talk) 11:53, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
    • Per WP:NOTNEWS, routine coverage of election campaigns is not noteworthy. Google News matches are "Greens are running Saoirse McHugh"; "in the debate Saoirse McHugh said"; "Saoirse McHugh might win"; "Saoirse McHugh narrowly lost". jnestorius( talk) 12:53, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete - fails WP:POLITICIAN, not convinced meets WP:GNG. Single event person, nothing else of notability in their life or career that is being indicated. Canterbury Tail talk 13:00, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 13:03, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
    • @ CAPTAIN RAJU: This is demonstrably not a single event.
      As even the nominator noted, she has been a candidate at three elections (2019 European Parliament, 2020 Dáil Éireann, 2020 Seanad Éireann), which is three events. McHugh has been highly prominent in all three (see e.g. civerage of her Seanad campaign) ... and she is now a quotable notable even outside election periods. (see e.g. [1]). -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 23:19, 11 April 2020 (UTC) reply
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Ireland-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 13:03, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 13:04, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete - Doesn't meet WP:NPOL as has never held national/similar office. Doesn't appear to meet WP:GNG as effectively all news coverage relates to various efforts as a candidate. And the only stand-out coverage (afforded to the subject which is different/more than that afforded to other candidates) is that of the clash with another specific/named candidate. Which is in the BLP1E realm. Not seeing any reason that this subject/candidate is any more notable than any other unsuccessful candidate for office... Guliolopez ( talk) 13:07, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete fails WP:POLITICIAN, regardless of her lack of success at 3 elections in 2019–20. -- SalmanZ ( talk) 13:41, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete per nom. The article cannot be notable according to WP:1E and WP:NOTNEWS. The subject fails WP:GNG and WP:POLITICIAN. Abishe ( talk) 13:46, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete per nom. The current prevalence of constant and instant news media can elevate the prominence of someone in search results, but ultimately, unless someone has a greater role in public life than three-time candidate, they aren't notable according to Wikipedia criteria. Niall Ó Tuathail, for example, also ran in three elections (two general and Seanad), and is important within the Social Democrats, but similarly isn't notable according to our criteria. — Iveagh Gardens ( talk) 15:37, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete every candidate will get some news coverage. Unelected candidates need something exceptional for us to justify the article. This has not always been our view and I have a suspecion that we have several old articles on unelected candidates that need to be deleted. John Pack Lambert ( talk) 16:50, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete. Fails WP:POLITICIAN as she is an unelected candidate. Lefcentreright Talk (plz ping) 09:20, 8 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete. People do not get Wikipedia articles just for being candidates in elections they did not win, but this doesn't even attempt to claim that she had preexisting notability for other reasons that would have gotten her an article independently of the candidacy. And just because she got a brief blip of WP:BLP1E coverage for scoring a rhetorical punch in a debate, against another candidate who also lost, is not in and of itself evidence that her candidacy passes the ten year test as a reason why people would still be looking for information about her in 2030. Obviously, no prejudice against recreation in the future if she accomplishes something more notable, like actually winning a future election. Bearcat ( talk) 16:19, 8 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Strong keep. Highly-notable politician, who is a household name in Ireland and easily meets WP:GNG.
The nomination is based on the nominator's misreading of WP:NPOL. All it does is to set a threshold by which politicians may be presumed notable without requiring specific evidence of that they meet GNG. It does NOT set a test which must be met to establish notability, which is how the nominator seems to be interpreting it ... and it is sad to see several editors !voting based on that false assumption.
@ Bearcat goes even further, setting a test that she accomplishes something more notable, which is no part of policy: WP:Notabilty is not about accomplishment. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of policy, because plenty of people who accomplished highly significant things do not meet WP:N simply because they have not been written about in enough reliable secondary sources ... and plenty of people achieve notability without accomplishment. Policy is very clear about this: the lead of WP:N says:

Determining notability does not necessarily depend on things such as fame, importance, or popularity—although those may enhance the acceptability of a subject that meets the guidelines explained below

Bearcat should apply policy, instead of imposing their own value judgement. But if you want to make value judgments on achievement, McHugh's success was to make the Green Party a significant contender outside the Dublin area. A lot of the West was deeply hostile to the Greens, but McHugh took her party from no-hoper to serious contender under Ireland's Single Transferable Vote system:
The comment by User:Jnestorius that routine coverage of election campaigns is not noteworthy is a misrepresentation of the facts. The coverage of McHugh is far from routine; overwhelming majority of unsuccessful Irish general election candidates get few or no mentions in the national media. McHugh was the Green candidate in the 2020 Irish general election in the Mayo constituency, so compare her with a) Tate Donnelly, the 2020 Green candidate in Cavan–Monaghan, b) T.P. O'Reilly, an unsuccessful Fine Gael candidate in Cavan–Monaghan who got roughly the same number of votes as McHugh:
That is a whole order of magnitude more coverage. McHugh is vastly more notable than many candidates who did win a seat in the 2020 election, e.g.:
Now look at some of the specific examples of coverage. Please note that this is an incomplete listing from only the first 5 pages (100 hits) of the 234 hits on Google News:
So I agree with User:AugusteBlanqui that the nominator did not do a thorough WP:BEFORE. I hope that User:Jnestorius will withdraw this nomination ... and if not, I hope that the closer will remember that WP:NOTVOTE. Facts and policy count for more than the pile-on of unevidenced and apparently un-researched assertions which is sadly evident above. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 19:50, 11 April 2020 (UTC) reply
Firstly, I do not apply "value judgements", and this is not the first time you have accused me of acting in bad faith for simply disagreeing with me on a matter of policy — in fact, I have already had to warn you in the past that I was prepared to report you to WP:ANI if you did not stop attacking me.
Now, to be clear: a lot of Wikipedia policies can be interpreted in a lot of different ways, and can be easily twisted out of shape to support things they were not intended to support. So it's not enough to just say that since a person meets the technical letter of one policy, she's exempted from having to meet other policies and standards. Specifically, because every single candiate in every single election everywhere can always show some evidence of campaign coverage, but we have an established consensus that every single candidate in every single election everywhere is not always notable enough for permanent coverage in Wikipedia, it is not enough to say "campaign coverage exists, ergo GNG met and she doesn't have to meet NPOL anymore" — if it were, then every candidate could always say that and NPOL would never actually apply to anybody anymore.
So the notability test for an unsuccessful candidate is not simply "some evidence of campaign coverage exists" — it is that the campaign coverage demonstrates a reason why even if she died tomorrow and never accomplished another thing as long as she lived, the candidacy itself was already so uniquely more special and more notable than everybody else's candidacies that she would already pass the ten year test for enduring significance. But that is not demonstrated by helping to increase her party's overall vote total from a losing percentage to a higher but still losing percentage; it is not demonstrated by being the bylined author of op-eds about other subjects; it is not demonstrated by giving Q&A interviews in the first person; and it is not demonstrated by giving soundbite to the media about her opinions on political issues within the context of the election campaign, just the same as every other candidate also did.
Even The New York Times, incidentally, is not an automatic notability-clincher for every single person who gets their name into that paper at all. It still covers purely local people of local interest who have achieved nothing encyclopedic; town councillors in Hempstead, for example, are not automatically more special than town councillors in Podunk, Arizona just because their routine local coverage happens to be in The New York Times instead of the Podunk Post; nor are unsuccessful candidates in New York City elections deemed more special than unsuccessful candidates elsewhere just because the routine local coverage of their losing campaign happens to appear in The New York Times instead of the Littleville Advertiser. Even New Yorkers still have to clear our notability standards exactly the same way as anybody else — namely, by accomplishing something that passes the subject-specific notability guideline for their occupation — and are not automatically more special than everybody else just because they live in or near New York City. So saying that an Irish paper is the Irish equivalent of The New York Times isn't a mic drop, because even The New York Times itself isn't always a mic drop.
But most importantly, the idea that the existence of campaign coverage is not automatically enough to hand an unelected candidate a GNG-based exemption from actually having to pass NPOL is not "my personal interpretation" of our inclusion rules for politicians: it's a long-established consensus that was established and upheld by a lot of Wikipedia discussions on a lot of unelected candidates. GNG is not, and never has been, just "count the footnotes and keep anything that passes an arbitrary number" — it also takes into account the context of what the coverage was given for, and deprecates some contexts as not notability-clinching coverage in and of itself. Bands and musicians, for instance, are not exempted from having to pass WP:NMUSIC just because they can show some local coverage in their local media. Writers are not exempted from having to pass WP:NAUTHOR just because they can show some coverage in their local media. School board trustees and municipal or county councillors are not exempted from having to pass NPOL just because they can show some coverage in their local media. High school athletes are not exempted from having to pass WP:ATHLETE just because they can show some human interest coverage in their local media about their efforts to get back onto the team after losing their big toe in a lawn mower accident. And unelected candidates for political office are not exempted from having to pass NPOL just because they can show the same campaign coverage that every unelected candidate can always show: either their campaign coverage demonstrates a reason why their candidacy would pass the ten-year test for enduring significance, or they're out. Not because I said that, but because established consensus says that.
And all of that is precisely why you are not entitled to accuse me of being a bad actor just because my understanding of policy is different from your understanding of policy. Wikipedia policies are never just about the letter of what the policy says: we also have a lot of established consensus around how the policies are interpreted in cases of differing opinion, and the established consensus around candidates is what I said it was: the existence of campaign coverage is not automatically enough to exempt a candidate from having to pass NPOL, because every candidate can always show the existence of campaign coverage. Bearcat ( talk) 20:41, 11 April 2020 (UTC) reply
Wow. @ Bearcat is reading way too much into this, finding stuff that isn't there and ignoring what is there.
I did not accuse [Bearcat] of being a bad actor or of acting in bad faith. I accused Bearcat of getting one part of policy wrong, and I did not question Bearcat good faith in that error. However, Bearcat's long ranting and rambling reply makes it very hard for me sustain that assumption of good faith.
Now to the substance. In the midst of that vast screed of unevidenced assertion of generalities, Bearcat has chosen to entirely ignore the actual evidence which I presented, and instead has chosen in repeatedly invent one straw man after another:
  1. Bearcat fundamentally misunderstands WP:NPOL. NPOL is not a requirement; it is an alternative path to notability for notability, and there is no policy basis for Bearcat's claim that unelected candidates for political office are not exempted from having to pass NPOL. I assert this without equivocation, because the notably guideline is absolutely explicit about this, at WP:N#Additional_criteria:

    A person who does not meet these additional criteria may still be notable under Wikipedia:Notability.

  2. Bearcat wrote: Even The New York Times, incidentally, is not an automatic notability-clincher for every single person who gets their name into that paper at all.
    Complete straw man, as is Bearcat's hyperbolic attempt to misrepresent me as having claimed that it was a mic drop. I never claimed that any one mention in any one paper was a clincher, nor did I claim anything remotely resembling that.
    The reality is that I posted a list of 16 articles in the mainstream national media, all of which primarily about McHugh, and noted the significance of each paper. Bearcat's comparison of that to every single person who gets their name into that paper at all is an extreme case of misrepresentation through hyperbole.
  3. Bearcat writes: Even The New York Times, incidentally, is not an automatic notability-clincher for every single person who gets their name into that paper at all.
    There is a second complete straw man in the same comment: I explicitly selected only those articles which were substantively about McHugh. I did not include anything which is a mere namecheck, or even in which she is secondary-but-still-significant topic. Bearcat's comment is again calculated to misrepresent the evidence posted.
  4. Bearcat asserts that is not demonstrated by helping to increase her party's overall vote total from a losing percentage to a higher but still losing percentage; it is not demonstrated by being the bylined author of op-eds about other subjects; it is not demonstrated by giving Q&A interviews in the first person; and it is not demonstrated by giving soundbite to the media about her opinions on political issues within the context of the election campaign, just the same as every other candidate also did.
    Again, those are more Beracat inventions of arbitrary tests for which Bearcat might make an interesting case ... but which are no part of the guideline. Bearcat should please learn to distinguish between actual policy/guideline, and their their own highly creative interpretations of policy/guideline.
  5. Bearcat makes repeated references to campaign coverage. But if Bearcat had actually bothered to read what I wrote and to check the links I posted, they would see a) some of articles are from outside of election campaign periods (e.g. [4], [5]), and b) I explicitly note that the set I posted was a subset of the 100 hits I scanned, out of a total of 234: I didn't even get to look at the headlines of the next 134; c) that there is clear not evidence that Bearcat's claim that this is just the same as every other candidate also did is simply false. Most worryingly, Bearcat would have known it to be false if they had studied the evidence before replying.
  6. Bearcat wrote: Bands and musicians, for instance, are not exempted from having to pass WP:NMUSIC just because they can show some local coverage in their local media. Writers are not exempted from having to pass WP:NAUTHOR just because they can show some coverage in their local media. School board trustees and municipal or county councillors are not exempted from having to pass NPOL just because they can show some coverage in their local media..
    This is yet more hyperbolic straw men. Again, I repeat that I posted evidence of 16 pieces of substantial coverage per WP:GNG in the mainstream national media. The effect of this ramble about musicians and writers is to convey the wholly false impression that the case for notability rests on local media.. All this verbiage about local media is a complete red herring, which has nothing to do with the actual evidence.
    I cannot know whether this verbose irrelevancy has been constricted by Bearcat as a deliberate obfuscation, or whether they are simply unable to comprehend that it is not relevant to a case case where there is clear evidence of huge slew of national media coverage. But either way, it is disruptive nonsense.
  7. Bearcat wrote: it is not enough to say 'campaign coverage exists, ergo GNG met and she doesn't have to meet NPOL anymore'. Again, I said no such thing: this is yet another straw man invented by Bearcat's fertile imagination, as Bearcat repeatedly misrepresents what I did actually post.
    I posted evidence that she has received massive coverage in national media. I posted links to sixteen piece of substantive coverage in the national media, and only 4 in local media. It's not just campaign coverage, and that which is campaign coverage is demonstrably exceptional. Bearcat's summary of the evidence as campaign coverage exists is yet another rhetorical flourish which uses massively deceptive misrepresentations to completely distort the nature of the evidence presented.
  8. Bearcat asserts: So the notability test for an unsuccessful candidate is not simply "some evidence of campaign coverage exists" — it is that the campaign coverage demonstrates a reason why even if she died tomorrow and never accomplished another thing as long as she lived, the candidacy itself was already so uniquely more special and more notable than everybody else's candidacies that she would already pass the ten year test for enduring significance.
    Again, lots of verbiage which ignores the quantitative and qualitative I posted evidence that McHugh's campaign is special because it received an order of magnitude more coverage than other unsuccessful candidates, and vastly more than some successful candidates.
Per WP:Consensus#Through_discussion Wikipedia:Consensus#Through_discussion. Sadly, Bearcat has chosen here to create multiple straw men, to wholly ignore the actual evidence, and serially misrepresent both policy and what I wrote.
If Bearcat wants to go to WP:ANI, then go ahead ... but beware the WP:BOOMERANG when more eyes are brought to bear on the pile of hyperbole, straw men, red herrings, denials of evidence, and fabrications of policy with which Bearcat is trying to sway this discussion. But if you don't go to ANI, then please just stop disrupting the consensus-forming discussion with these hyperbolic distraction techniques. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 22:42, 11 April 2020 (UTC) reply
Firstly, you most certainly did accuse me of misrepresenting policy, unless you somehow consider the words "setting a test which is no part of policy" and "fundamental misunderstanding of policy" and "should apply policy instead of their own value judgement" to be substantively different from "misrepresenting policy". Just because I summarized your words instead of quoting them literally verbatim doesn't mean I was wrong about what you said.
You did very explicitly call attention to one paper's status as Ireland's equivalent to The New York Times, for example — so if you weren't intending to imply that "New York Times = automatic booyah because it's the New York Times", then what else was even the point of the comparison at all, given that without that implication the metaphor literally serves no discernible purpose at all? As well, you claim that she has coverage outside of election-related contexts — but I'd kindly invite you to review which sources actually exist outside of election campaigns, because the only one you've explicitly identified as such is still covering her in the context of expressing a personal opinion about the upcoming election campaign, and thus is still campaign-related. It doesn't automatically count as "coverage independent of election" just because it's dated outside of an active election campaign period, if the substance of what the article is about is still election-related. And even in terms of the volume of media hits, a person who runs as a candidate in two elections would be merely expected to be able to show about twice as much campaign coverage as somebody who only ran once, so she isn't automatically more special than other candidates on that basis either.
Ireland is also a country which does not even have the kind of meaningful distinction between "local" and "national" media that exists in, say, North America. According to our article about Media in the Republic of Ireland, there's no such thing as a non-national daily in Ireland at all — all the daily papers are automatically national, and the regional or local papers are exclusively weekly. And similarly, virtually all television service in Ireland is national, with no evidence of regional or local stations independently producing separate regional or local newscasts — even the "regional" news show on RTÉ One, according to its article, is still a single nationally broadcast show which covers human interest and cultural stories — so all election coverage on all Irish television networks is also inherently national, simply because there are no non-national television news operations to produce any. So election candidates, especially in European Parliament elections where there are only three nationwide seats, would still simply be expected to automatically have "national" coverage, simply because that's where the political coverage of national elections happens in the first place.
So the national coverage fails to distinguish her as more special than other candidates, because every candidate in a national election in Ireland always has "national" coverage by virtue of the way Irish media works on an almost entirely national scale — and the volume of coverage fails to single her out as markedly more special than other candidates, simply because she ran and lost in two national elections rather than just one, and thus would simply be expected to have roughly double the volume of campaign coverage compared to somebody who only ran once. And you still have yet to demonstrate your assertion that she has additional coverage outside of the context of election campaigns, because the only hit you've specifically labelled as such is still campaign-related.
And as for how hyperbolic and strawmanny and redherringy and distracty and denialy I am, I can assure you that I've got a well-established and well-earned and well-deserved and quite accurate reputation around here for being exactly none of those things whatsoever. Again, just because I summarized your words instead of repeating your exact words verbatim doesn't make me wrong about what you said. Bearcat ( talk) 00:07, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
@ Bearcat: please stop playing these games. This FUD is timewasting and disruptive.
  1. You write: just because I summarized your words instead of repeating your exact words verbatim doesn't make me wrong about what you said.
    The problem is not one of summary. The problem is that you repeatedly chose to either grossly misrepresent what I had clearly written, lading it with your own false assumptions; and that you systematically ignore whole bundles of evidence which don't suit your pre-deterined, policy-denying outcome.
  2. Stop moving the goalposts.
    In your post 12.41, you claimed that I accused [you] of acting in bad faith and that accuse me of being a bad actor. The reality is that in my post of 19:50, I accused you of setting a test that she accomplishes something more notable, which is no part of policy and imposing their own value judgement. I did not suggest bad faith; you chose to read that into my words, just as you also choose to read into my words many other things which are not there. As I explicitly stated in my second reply, it was only after your reply to my first post that I began to abandon the AGF, because the evidence of bad faith was getting too strong to ignore. And you continue to offer yet more evidence of your bad faith.
  3. You write You did very explicitly call attention to one paper's status as Ireland's equivalent to The New York Times, for example — so if you weren't intending to imply that "New York Times = automatic booyah because it's the New York Times", then what else was even the point of the comparison at all, given that without that implication the metaphor literally serves no discernible purpose at all?.
    Sigh. Please do at least try to read before replying. I noted that to assert the the Irish Times is a significant reliable source, as required by WP:GNG. I also made similar comments on the first mention of the other national media sources which I cited.
    It appears that you are unable or unwilling to distinguish between:
    a) multiple observation of the significance per policy of the source of each publisher of a piece of substantive coverage;
    b) some childish booyah comment about a lone link of your own imagination.
    This goes to the core of GNG, and if after all your time on WP you cannot or will not make that distinction, then please desist from participating in such discussions. Or are you simply trying by sheer volume of posting to erect a smokescreen around the fact that there are at least 16 items of intellectually-independent substantial coverage in reliable sources?
  4. You wrote Ireland is also a country which does not even have the kind of meaningful distinction between "local" and "national" media that exists in, say, North America.
    This is utter fantasy. The Mayo Advertiser and The Connaught Telegraph are local; they do not have national reach. The fact that they they publish weekly rather than daily does not alter the fact that they are local. ( Frequency ≠ Geography. They are separate concepts).
  5. You wrote: all election coverage on all Irish television networks is also inherently national, simply because there are no non-national television news operations.
    Surprisingly for Bearcat's comments at this XFD, that is entirely true. Ireland has only national TV stations.
    Unsurprisingly, it is yet another addition to Bearcat's large pile of red herrings, because:
    a) even if there is no local TV, national TV is still national TV;
    b) No TV coverage has been cited by me or anyone else as evidence of McHugh's notability, so it is all utterly irrelevant. Yet more pointless verbiage and FUD.
  6. You wrote: especially in European Parliament elections where there are only three nationwide seats.
    Yet more fanatasy. The reality that is that there are actually 13 seats, none of them nationwide. There are currently three constituencies, each of which has multiple seats: Midlands–North-West (4 seats), South (5 seats), and Dublin (4 seats).
    You would have known that if you had followed the link I posted before to Midlands–North-West, but again you choose to ignore evidence and assert a falsehood. Your repeated assertions as fact of these blatant falsehoods about Ireland are disruptive. Please stop, and stick to some topic which you either know something about already, or are willing to actually learn about rather than asserting demonstrable falsehoods.
  7. the national coverage fails to distinguish her as more special than other candidates, because every candidate in a national election in Ireland always has "national" coverage by virtue of the way Irish media works on an almost entirely national scale.
    Absolutely not true:
    a) Local newspapers and local radio are significant players, and local radio produces its own content;
    Most candidates get little or no national coverage in the course of a campaign, as demonstrated by the links above.
  8. You write: the volume of coverage fails to single her out as markedly more special than other candidates, simply because she ran and lost in two national elections rather than just one, and thus would simply be expected to have roughly double the volume of campaign coverage compared to somebody who only ran once.
    Again, demonstrably false:
    a) McHugh ran in 3 elections, not two. (That tally of 3 is mentioned even in the brief nomination statement. Looks like Bearcat didn't read that either.)
    McHugh's coverage is not proportional to the number of elections. She got more than 8 times as much coverage as her party colleague Tate Donnelly. When compared with successful party colleague Marc Ó Cathasaigh, she has got 4.9 times as much coverage; when compared with ualine Tully (from another party), she got 2.7 times as much coverage.
    All that evidence is already on this page, set out clearly in bullet points, yet you persist in posting as if that evidence did not exist. Why? What's going on here? Are you unable to read it? Unwilling to read it? Unable to comprehend it? Or just ignoring it for some reason? Whatever the cause, your repeated denial of the evidence is highly disruptive — and if you believe your claim to have a good reputation, it should be highly embarrassing to you.
    There is no basis in policy for your claim that being highly prominent in multiple elections doesn't help establish notability; it's just another principle you made up to suit your purpose, and which you assert as if it was policy rather than your own personal notion. It's self-evidently nonsense, because if we applied that principle to a hypothetical person who stood as a candidate if every Dáil and European election throughout her life (say about 30 elections) your logic would still claim that she was non-notable even though she had orders of magnitude more coverage than most people who had won a seat.
  9. You write: And you still have yet to demonstrate your assertion that she has additional coverage outside of the context of election campaigns, because the only hit you've specifically labelled as such is still campaign-related.
    Again, Bearcat makes an assertion which is simply false as a a point of fact: see [6], which was 6 months before the general election date was announced. See also [7], post-election.
    It is possible that you assumed out of unfamiliarity with the topic that Ireland is like the USA, where an election campaign lasts for a whole year; but that is not the case in Ireland, where elections are conducted over a period of weeks. And if that was not your assumption, then your rejection of those links is just yet more counter-factual nonsense.
The fact remains that the evidence shows that McHugh was one of the most prominent candidates in both the 2019 Euro election and the 2020 Mayo Dáil election ... yet here we have an editor with very little knowledge of Ireland who is engaging in a sustained campaign of fabricating policy tests, spouting hyperbole, repeatedly misrepresenting another editor, denying evidence and spouting streams of very basic falsehoods about Irish politics and media, all with the aim of ensuring that Wikipedia deletes its already poor coverage of someone who is already way more notable than many serving legislators in Ireland. What on earth is going on here?
Your claim about your reputation is interesting, but does not reflect what I have see from your history, and from your bizarrely fact-averse and policy-inventing conduct on this page. You are welcome to put it to the test at ANI, but please stop disrupting this XFD with this nonsnese. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 02:12, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  1. The problem is not one of summary. The problem is that you repeatedly chose to either grossly misrepresent what I had clearly written, lading it with your own false assumptions; and that you systematically ignore whole bundles of evidence which don't suit your pre-deterined, policy-denying outcome. Er, yeah, no. I didn't misrepresent anything, or lay in any false assumptions, and I don't systematically ignore whole bundles of anything.
  2. Bearcat fundamentally misunderstands WP:NPOL. NPOL is not a requirement; it is an alternative path to notability for notability, and there is no policy basis for Bearcat's claim that unelected candidates for political office are not exempted from having to pass NPOL. I do not fundamentally misunderstand NPOL at all. As I already said above: every candidate in every election everywhere can always show enough campaign-based coverage to at least attempt a claim that they pass WP:GNG. So if that were how political notability worked, then every candidate would always be exempted from having to pass NPOL at all, and NPOL itself would never actually apply to anybody at all anymore. However, we have an established consensus that every candidate everywhere is not automatically notable enough for an article, but rather the key to making a candidate notable enough for an article is to establish that their candidacy somehow passes the ten-year test for enduring significance — and we have an established consensus that GNG is not just a question of counting a person's sources for their number, but also of testing for the context of what they're covering the person for, and deprecating some sources as not GNG-supporting if they exist in non-notable contexts.
    Which is why the examples of musicians and writers and high school athletes that I raised above were not a "distraction" — they are pertinent examples of the kind of people who can, and routinely do, try to claim that the existence of some coverage in non-notable contexts, like playing their first-ever show at their hometown pub or winning a local poetry contest or getting human interest coverage about their recovery from having a toe amputated, is enough to exempt them from actually having to pass the defined notability standards for their occupation just because "media coverage exists and therefore they pass GNG". We see that kind of thing all the time at AFD, but we have an established consensus that GNG is not just "count the footnotes and keep anybody who surpasses an arbitrary number", but still requires the context of what the person is getting covered for to at least have some relationship to our subject-specific inclusion criteria for their occupation. This is not some personal standard I'm making up outside of policy, either: it is an established consensus for how notability actually works when it's questioned at AFD.
    And incidentally, even officeholders who do pass NPOL are not actually exempted from having to pass GNG either: they do pass GNG, and we're just not always on the ball about writing and sourcing good articles that accurately reflect their passage of GNG. There is not a single NPOL-holding officeholder on earth who actually can't show GNG-passing sources: the fact that they can show GNG-passing sources, in fact, is precisely the reason why we deem them "inherently" notable at all. NPOL isn't a question of exempting politicians from passing GNG: it exists to try to stop editors from wasting AFD's time on articles that may look bad in their current state, but are repairable because better sources are already known to exist.
  3. I did not suggest bad faith; you chose to read that into my words, just as you also choose to read into my words many other things which are not there. This is another example of what I'm talking about when I say I'm not misrepresenting your words: just because you didn't use the words "bad faith" does not mean you did not accuse me of bad faith — because the substance of what you accused me of doing is bad faith actions. An accusation of misrepresenting policy is, by definition, an accusation of bad faith. An accusation of making up my own alternative inclusion standards outside of policy is, by definition, an accusation of bad faith. An accusation of imposing my own value judgements in defiance of policy is, by definition, an accusation of bad faith. Whether you used the words "bad faith" or not, you are inherently accusing me of doing things that are, by definition, bad faith things to do, and just because you didn't use those exact words doesn't mean you didn't do the thing those words mean.
  4. Again, Bearcat makes an assertion which is simply false as a a point of fact: see [8], which was 6 months before the general election date was announced. See also [9], post-election. I already addressed the first of those two hits; the fact that it is dated outside of an election campaign does not make it not campaign-related coverage, because the substance of what it is about is her personal opinions on the outcome of the upcoming election. Again, it comes down to the context of what she's getting covered for — and if it's still an election-related context, then it doesn't escape being campaign-related coverage just because the date on it happens to fall outside of the official election period. And as for that second source, it isn't about her at all — she is not its subject, but merely a provider of a 45-word soundbite within an article about the pandemic. A person's notability is not supported by sources in which they merely provide a short quote, but are not in any non-trivial way a central subject of the source. Again, that's not a personal standard that I made up myself — it's part of AFD's established consensus that sources in which the person is merely a giver of soundbite in an article about something other than themselves, but not substantively a subject of the source, do not help to get the person over GNG.
  5. This is utter fantasy. The Mayo Advertiser and The Connaught Telegraph are local; they do not have national reach. The fact that they they publish weekly rather than daily does not alter the fact that they are local. ( Frequency ≠ Geography. They are separate concepts). You are neither telling me anything I didn't already know, nor contradicting anything I actually said — you are, in fact, doing exactly what you're accusing me of doing: arguing with a strawman in your head instead of with what I actually said. I didn't say Ireland doesn't have local newspapers: I said that the distinction between what gets covered at the local level and what gets covered at the national level doesn't cut in the same place as it does in North America or even the UK — in Ireland, the national elections get covered much more extensively in the national media, so that every candidate in the entire country can virtually always show more evidence of "nationalized" coverage than a similar candidate in Canada or the United States or England might have, simply because the national media is where a much bigger chunk of the election coverage is. That is not the same thing as failing to understand that local and national don't mean the same thing, or that geography and frequency mean different things either.
  6. Yet more fanatasy. The reality that is that there are actually 13 seats, none of them nationwide. There are currently three constituencies, each of which has multiple seats: Midlands–North-West (4 seats), South (5 seats), and Dublin (4 seats). You would have known that if you had followed the link I posted before to Midlands–North-West, but again you choose to ignore evidence and assert a falsehood. No, you are going to chalk this up to a dialect difference rather than an error on my part. In my dialect of English, the constituencies are the seats — in my dialect of English, three constituencies electing 13 representatives in a multi-member proportional system is three seats, not thirteen seats, because "seats" is the constituencies rather than the people per se. But regardless of whether we call them "seats" or "constituencies", the substance of my point doesn't actually change: with just three electoral divisions encompassing the entire country, the coverage of a European Parliament election is going to be even more highly nationalized than the coverage of a Dáil Éireann election. I wasn't wrong, we merely speak two slightly different dialects of English that use words in slightly different ways sometimes — and I'd recommend you keep that in mind in the future, because this is not actually the first time you've tried to hang me on an "error" that was entirely explainable as a mere difference of dialect.
  7. I'm not going to keep engaging you on the matter of my reputation, except to say that I know perfectly well that I'm not deluded about it. I am not known around here for having a problematic edit history, or for being "bizarrely fact-averse" or "policy-inventing", and the idea that I am is funny at best and teetering on the edge of an outright WP:NPA violation. But that's the last I'm going to say about that, and I'm not engaging on that any further. Bearcat ( talk) 03:58, 12 April 2020 (UTC) ::::::So the FUD barage continues reply
  1. I didn't misrepresent anything, or lay in any false assumptions, and I don't systematically ignore whole bundles of anything.
    Yes, you did, and you still do.
    a) you misrepresented one item from a list of 16 as an attempt to claim that I was making a claim of notability on the basis of one article. A Bearcat fabrication.
    b) You ignored the evidence that she has vastly more coverage that an other candidates, successful or not.
    It's all there above, and if you want to go to ANI, your systematic misrepresentations will be clearly evident.
  2. I do not fundamentally misunderstand NPOL at all.
    This would be hilarious if the denialism wasn't so verbosely disruptive. WP:NPOL says explicitly:

    Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline.

    .
    So your repeated references to NPOL are a red herring, and all your verbiage about it is simply your own impressively-creative imaginings.
    the examples of musicians and writers and high school athletes that I raised above were not a "distraction".
    Yes they were, because they were all explicitly bout local coverage, whereas I had presented evidence of McHugh getting exceptional national coverage. Try reading what you actually wrote.
  3. An accusation of misrepresenting policy is, by definition, an accusation of bad faith.
    Don't be silly. Misinterpretation can be done in error or bad faith.
  4. I already addressed the first of those two hits; the fact that it is dated outside of an election campaign does not make it not campaign-related coverage, because the substance of what it is about is her personal opinions on the outcome of the upcoming election. Again, it comes down to the context of what she's getting covered for — and if it's still an election-related context, then it doesn't escape being campaign-related coverage just because the date on it happens to fall outside of the official election period..
    Another a Bearcat reading comprehension failure. Looks at the two links I posted: [10] and [11]. They are both about formation of a coalition government, rather than about an election campaign. Since Bearcat doesn't seem to understand the difference, let me spell it out: government formation is a process which can happen only after election results are known. It therefore cannot be part of an election campaign.
  5. I didn't say Ireland doesn't have local newspapers: I said that the distinction between what gets covered at the local level and what gets covered at the national level doesn't cut in the same place as it does in North America or even the UK — in Ireland, the national elections get covered much more extensively in the national media, so that every candidate in the entire country can virtually always show more evidence of "nationalized" coverage than a similar candidate in Canada or the United States or England might have, simply because the national media is where a much bigger chunk of the election coverage is. That is not the same thing as failing to understand that local and national don't mean the same thing, or that geography and frequency mean different things either..
    The fact that Ireland is not North America is irrelevant, because the guideline makes no reference to North America. Bearcat appears to be assuming that North America sets some sort of baseline against which everything else must be measured, which is a thoroughly POV stance with no foundation in policy or guideline.
    The rest of this is just more of Bearcat's FUD smokescreen to distract from the evidence I posted that McHugh got massively more coverage than candidates who were actually elected.
    This diversion would serve a purpose if it was some sort of game to fill the page with verbose irrelevancies, and hope that the closer gives up in despair. If not, it's a sad illustration of a thoroughly POV attempt to filter the rest of the world through a North American lens.
  6. In my dialect of English, the constituencies are the seats.
    Not true. This is not a mater of dialect; it is a matter of different electoral systems. In your county, each constituency has one seat ... whereas in Ireland, each constituency has multiple seats.
    And you failed to distinguish between the electoral system of your own country and that of the country which you have chosen to discuss, thereby stating something which was untrue.
    Note that yet again, you express no regret at all about about your decision to make a false statement ... and instead try to blame me for the fact you wrote something false. Not good conduct.
    the substance of my point doesn't actually change: with just three electoral divisions encompassing the entire country, the coverage of a European Parliament election is going to be even more highly nationalized than the coverage of a Dáil Éireann election.
    This "substance" is another red herring based on a false assumption. The false assumption is your wholly unevidenced trans-Atlantic assertion that there is a difference in the balance of coverage; the reality is that there is is huge local coverage of the Euro elections, and i see no evidence of a centralisation effect. The red herring is that centralisation of coverage is irrelevant, because McHugh got an exceptional amount of coverage.
I'm not going to keep engaging you on the matter of my reputation.
Your conduct here speaks for itself.
I hope that will be an end to this nonsense. - BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs)
I agree with User:AugusteBlanqui that the nominator did not do a thorough WP:BEFORE. I hope that User:Jnestorius will withdraw this nomination — I had in fact scanned through articles like those BrownHairedGirl has listed; I was unimpressed and won't withdraw the nomination. McHugh is very far from being a household name in Ireland. I agree that she got a notch more election coverage than other candidates with a similar level of votes; she is media-savvy and has a column in thejournal.ie. Per WP:SYN, one article titled "Why is everyone talking about Saoirse McHugh" would be more convincing than 20 talking about Saoirse McHugh. Or maybe doi: 10.1080/07907184.2019.1652165 has something substantial. jnestorius( talk) 01:00, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
@ jnestorius I have found precisely nothing in policy which either:
  1. allows this dismissal of evidence of sustained significant coverage to be discounted because of a Wikipedia editor's personal observation that a person is media-savvy
  2. Requires the existence of article asking Why is everyone talking about her.
Please can you quote the relevant full paragraphs of the policy or guideline which require or suggest this. And no, nme-checking WP:SYN is not valid; SYN is about a wholly different issue, and the relevant policy here is WP:GNG which explicitly requires weighing multiple sources.
And no, she did not a notch more election coverage than other candidates with a similar level of votes; that's a cleverly jesuitical use of words to misrepresent the facts. The evidence which I posted above shows very clearly that shew got many whole-digit multiples more coverage than candidates who got more votes and won a seat. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 02:26, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
I'm sure we all agree that WP:GNG is the starting point. WP:GNG says "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail. That is vague, and the two extreme examples given at WP:GNG don't help much. I When the general guideline is vague, it is legitimate to have recourse to more specific guidelines, like WP:NPOL, that interpret the vague terms for a given context. Sticking to GNG, it seems to refer to quality rather than number. Of all the articles you have listed, there are only two I can see that "address the topic directly" ("Saoirse McHugh selling her Green vision to rural Ireland" and "Rider on the Storm"). Are they "in detail"? I would have though they were both too short for that, but maybe there is precedent you can point to. GNG also says "Presumed" means that significant coverage in reliable sources creates an assumption, not a guarantee, that a subject merits its own article. The point about being media-savvy is to explain why she got more of the routine election coverage. If one candidate gets 5 articles and another gets 50 articles that doesn't mean 5 are routine and the other 45 are not. They may all be routine. jnestorius( talk) 03:28, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
@ jnestorius: WP:NPOL does not interpret the vague terms for a given context. It provides an alternative path to notability, but offers no interpretive guidance on GNG. And WP:NPOL explicitly says:

Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline.

So just leave NPOL out of it. It does not apply, and refers us back to GNG.
As to the notion of all that substantial coverage about her in serious national newspapers not being "in detail", what do you want? Multi-volume biographies? If GNG required some such of high threshold, it would say so.
And as to this whole "media-savvy" thing, it's a pure invention of yours for which you cite no sources. You are attempting to impose your own hostile value judgement on her media coverage without any evidence. Describing her as "media-savvy" is a polite way of saying "successful attention-seeker", which gives zero credit to the editorial processes of broadsheet journalists and editors whose justification is presumably not just clickbait, but that she has something significant to say. This isn't even WP:OR by you: it is simply prejudicial speculation.
If, as you claim one candidate gets 5 articles and another gets 50 articles that doesn't mean that 5 are routine and the other 45 are not. They may all be routine, esp when most candidates get 5 articles ... then the word "routine" loses all meaning.
Sorry, Jnestorius, but this is sophistry. And its all being done to ensure that an exceptionally high-profile political newcomer is denied an article, by using the most extreme application I have seen of GNG ... while tens of thousands of permastub articles are created on people who entirely bypass any scrutiny because they once played for a few minutes in a single professional ballgame. The evidence is unambiguous that McHugh gets far more coverage in reliable sources (and vastly more "significant coverage") than many of the people for whom NPOL is a bypass to GNG scrutiny.
So what on earth is going on here? -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 04:21, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • comment Saoirse McHugh is discussed in a recent academic analysis, both in the context of the RTE debate and the inadequacies of public opinion polling: [1] "In contrast, the big winners were the Green Party, which topped the poll in Dublin, and seemed likely to get all three candidates elected, with McHugh getting 12% of first preferences in MNW and Grace O'Sullivan getting the same in Ireland South. Sinn Féin seemed likely to keep two of its seats, but Lynn Boylan seemed to be in a precarious position in Dublin. This poll, however, did prove to be controversial, especially once results came out, as it underestimated Fianna Fáil and overestimated Green (especially Saoirse McHugh) support." And: "These debates failed to have much of an impact on public engagement with the elections, aside from the performance of the Green Party's Saoirse McHugh in RTÉ's MNW debate on 21 May, in which she challenged Peter Casey's views on immigration. This exchange led to McHugh trending on Twitter and being labelled the ‘unexpected star’ of the debates, with the odds of her winning a seat falling as a result" The lead of the article was written during the European election, after the RTE debate. It should be rewritten now to reflect McHugh's profile as a politician/activist. Which one of the three elections that McHugh contested would the delete votes like to pick for their WP:1E? I also agree with User:BrownHairedGirl that there is substantial coverage of McHugh in national media beyond the converage of her candidicies. AugusteBlanqui ( talk) 07:28, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • Delete per nom. Fails WP:Politician. Spleodrach ( talk) 11:53, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
    @ Spleodrach, yes she fails NPOL. But WP:NPOL explicitly says:

    Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline.

    And per my evidence above, McHugh does meet the GNG, in spades. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 13:59, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
She fails GNG as well, she's a serial election loser, that's all. No need to reply further, as I won't read it, like I did not read the huge swathes of text above, because life's too short! Spleodrach ( talk) 14:22, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
@ Spleodrach, per NPOL, being a a serial election loser is no bar to passing GNG.
And "fails GNG 'cos I couldn't be bothered to even look at the mountain of evidence" (I paraphrase) is a v poor argument. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 14:59, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
I read the excellent arguments put forward by Bearcat, and find myself in total agreement with them. Still a delete !vote from me. Spleodrach ( talk) 20:54, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
In between Bearcat's forest of hyperbole and tangents and misrepresentations, their main arguments are:
a) that WP:NPOL applies. That is absurd: it is explicitly refuted in NPOL:

Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline.

b) if she accomplishes something more notable ... which is a clear rejection of the WP:GNG, which says

Determining notability does not necessarily depend on things such as fame, importance, or popularity

Yes, the guideline continues:

although those may enhance the acceptability of a subject that meets the guidelines explained below

Not that wording "may enhance". It does not make such factors a barrier to a topic which has received huge amounts of substantial coverage.
b) that posting 16 instances of articles in reliable sources substantively about McHugh should be dismissed and derided as an attempt to claim that one lone mention in one of those sources is enough. Absurd: no such claim was made or implied.
c) that sustained coverage over the course of three elections and the periods inbetween and after them is WP:BLP1E coverage.
d) coverage outside of an election campaign period is "campaign coverage" even though it is explicitly not about the campaign or the election. Bizarre.
e) that Ireland has no local television., Which is true, but utterly irrelevant.
f) that in European Parliament elections where there are only three nationwide seats. Utter nonsense: there are 13 seats, and none is nationwide.
g) that all candidates get coverage during elections, so it should be discounted. This ignores the evidence that she got way more overage than other candidates, including some who were successful.
Strange that anyone would endorse all that. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 23:08, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply
Still refusing to respect my !vote, trying to browbeat me into changing it, and an inability to respect other peoples different positions. Seems you have learnt nothing from your recent desysoping. Sad! Spleodrach ( talk) 10:01, 13 April 2020 (UTC) reply
You have clearly made up your mind, so my post was intend to help the closer evaluate your !vote. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 17:05, 13 April 2020 (UTC) reply
That's a strange use of the word 'respect'. Konli17 ( talk) 20:25, 13 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Keep - excellent and thorough arguments from BrownHairedGirl, thank you. Konli17 ( talk) 18:16, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply

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.
  1. ^ Johnston, Samuel A. T. (2020-01-02). "The 2019 European Parliament elections in Ireland". Irish Political Studies. 35 (1): 18–28. doi: 10.1080/07907184.2019.1652165. ISSN  0790-7184.
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