Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/California's 10th congressional district election, 2018

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California's 10th congressional district election, 2018

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It's not standard practice on Misplaced Pages to content-fork standalone articles about each individual congressional district's individual results in a national or statewide election. Special elections get their own standalone articles, because they're isolated topics that aren't part of any larger event in which they can be discussed, and thus can't be merged anywhere else — but regular elections on the standard national election day just get covered in one statewide results article per state, not spun off as standalone articles about each individual district. In both of these instances, the only special notability claim that really exists at all is that the results were close enough that the winner couldn't be declared on election night, because mail-in and provisional ballots were still in play — but that's not a strong reason why an individual district would need its own standalone election article when United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2018 already exists, with space for these to be discussed there.
Our role is to have articles about things that pass the ten-year test for enduring significance, not to necessarily start an article about every single thing that happens to be present in the current news cycle — but neither of these shows a credible 10YT pass. If one of these turned into such a pitched legal battle that the seat was still vacant when the new house convenes in January, then maybe there would be a credible case for creating a standalone article, but "the results haven't been finalized yet as of five days after election day" is not a strong reason in and of itself why a standalone article would be necessary yet. Bearcat (talk) 17:37, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Keep - the United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2018 article was a pale substitute for this article. California has 53 elections like this one every year, and at least some of them will be notable in the long term. As we discovered with articles like the Audrey Denney article, we have an opportunity to attract new editors each time we have an election. Sending people to an omnibus article like United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2018 is a horrifying introduction to Misplaced Pages for newcomers, and I suspect we lose many because we are so eager to herd them to omnibus article. Sometimes, the election won't be notable, and that's ok...we can then blank and redirect to the appropriate section of the United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2018 article. This election will certainly remain notable though, due both to the close margins, and due to the drama that occurred during the primary. -- RobLa (talk) 18:16, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

it's worth noting that Bearcat accidentally linked the AfD nomination for California's 39th congressional district election, 2018 to this page rather than to the existing nomination the existing AfD nomination page, where there's an archive of the June AfD discussion. Many of the discussion points in that AfD discussion also apply to this discussion. -- RobLa (talk) 18:38, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

New renominations are not relinked back to the old closed discussions — they are linked to the currently open discussion, which is this one. So no, I didn't accidentally do anything incorrect — this page is the correct place for that article's AFD template to link to, because this page is where the currently active discussion about its includability or lack thereof is taking place. Bearcat (talk) 18:56, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Keep - California's 10th congressional district election was an important 2018 midterm race for the U.S. House of Representatives and deserves special coverage, for a couple reasons: 1) this race was identified as a key battleground that might have affected partisan control of the U.S. House in the 116th Congress (Source: Ballotpedia); 2) California 10 is the swing district closest to San Francisco, leading to an unprecedented level of civic engagement, with tens of thousands of Bay Area volunteers phone banking or canvassing for Josh Harder (Sources: New York Times, SwingLeft); 3) Josh Harder represents a new model for candidates from the business world -- smart, early-in-their-career moderates who are willing to give up making big money to run for office (Source: Recode). These are important distinctions, which are likely to impact American politics in the future. There is not enough space for those distinctions to be made in the broad, but shallow United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2018 article. For those reasons, I believe it is appropriate for this CA-10 election to be covered in its own article on Misplaced Pages. Thank you for your consideration. Fabrice Florin (talk) 19:58, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Firstly, Ballotpedia is a user-generated source on which anybody can insert any claim they want to insert, so it is not a reliable source for the claim that one particular district towered over every other district in the United States as The Ultimate Deciding Battle for partisan control of the House. Secondly, SwingLeft is an advocacy group, not a media outlet. Thirdly, phone banking happens everywhere, and lots of districts across the United States saw a major increase in civic engagement this year compared to most midterms, so being "the swing district closest to San Francisco" is not inherently more special than being the closest swing district to Los Angeles or Houston or Chicago or New York City or Miami or Seattle. Fourthly, any reliably sourceable content about the idea that Harder represents a radical or innovative new model for candidates belongs in Harder's WP:BLP, not in an article about the race. None of these are reasons why the California 10th or the California 39th are "special" enough to warrant treatment denied the other 433 congressional districts in the country. Bearcat (talk) 20:25, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Ballotpedia is no longer an open wiki, so I don't think that WP:USERG applies there anymore. -- RobLa (talk) 21:27, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, (sadly) Ballotpedia is fully under editorial control of employed staff, they kicked all the volunteer editors out, so it should meet RS guidelines. Legoktm (talk) 12:08, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Delete We don't need articles on elections in individual constituencies. This should either be covered at the article on the constituency, or a results page of the wider House elections. Number 5 7 21:07, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

@Number 57:: Could you be more specific when you say "we". I believe Misplaced Pages does need articles like this, and I've made that case over at Talk:United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_California,_2018#Splitting_off_election_articles. -- RobLa (talk) 02:38, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with me using the word "we" here. If I said "We don't believe these articles are required", that would be problematic because I'm speaking on other people's behalf. However, I am able to hold the view that we don't need these articles. The fact that you're quibbling over a perfectly valid use of language suggests you might be so invested in trying to keep this article that you can no longer see the wood for the trees. Number 5 7 12:59, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Delete This article is an unneeded duplication of the United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2018#District 10 article. David O. Johnson (talk) 04:41, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
I don't have a strong enough opinion to vote - I'm not yet sold on having individual articles for races. I think it would help if there was some test or criterion (as an alternative to using the ten year test) to decide when a race should be split into its own article. I do agree with RobLa that the mega article for all 53 California House races doesn't provide the level of detail I'd expect from Misplaced Pages. Maybe it's a California specific problem and we should better split the lists to allow for more textual content? I'm not really sure. An RfC might be a better forum for this rather than AfD. Legoktm (talk) 12:08, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

@Legoktm: thank you for weighing in. I agree that automatically blessing individual articles for all 435 races every two years could be problematic, and I'm willing to concede that each race is not automatically wp:notable. Still, I have a hard time seeing why an article about the election between Jeff Denham and Josh Harder is less notable than the United States House of Representatives election in Wyoming, 2018. I hope we can get past the kneejerk "not notable" reaction anytime an article centering on a specific U.S. congressional seat is proposed. I think the CA-10 race is one of the clearer examples of a notable election (albeit not as notable as, say, WA-05 in 1994, or VA-07 in 2014, or NY-14 in 2018, but still more notable than WY-AtLarge in 2018).

I looked at some pageview states for the CA-10 article, which give a sense of how biased the view that Misplaced Pages presented to people who used our site to read up on the issues at the last minute. Here's a few of the relevant pages:

If you look at the election-day content of those pages, it was quite biased toward the incumbent, which made Misplaced Pages a terrible resource for neutral information about that election. Though the CA-10/Denham/Harder set above wasn't as incumbent-biased as other close races in California, it still provided a good example of bias in Misplaced Pages. As I've already confessed my personal bias toward Harder, my proposed change arguably hurts my self-interest. I'm making the case for a less biased approach toward dealing with a non-incumbent Republican challenger in 2020, because my hope here is to ensure we have a robust process to live up to our WP:NPOV aspirations in the lead-up to the 2020 election, and to make sure we have a place to direct eager new editors to collaborate on prose for not-yet-notable candidates rather than forcing them to toil in Draft space for the months before the election.

One thing to note about the pageviews in #4 above (the big CA 2018 article). I'm guessing that at least some non-trivial number of pageviews were from people looking for challenger candidates all over California but only had redirects that pointed to the section of the page for that district. Readers were confronted with a tangle of tables, largely focused on the primary that already happened in June. For example, people interested in learning more about Josh Harder before November 11 were redirected here: "Josh Harder" redirect target on 2018-11-06.

Perhaps a better example is stepping through the experience for where people in CA-45 were pointed when they tried visiting the "Katie Porter" page. As of this writing, her page is still a redirect despite the fact that she is now in the lead in the vote count. On election day, that redirect went here: "Katie Porter" redirect target on 2018-11-06.

What's also bad about the the big CA 2018 article is that diffs are difficult even for someone as experienced as I am. I wouldn't want to use the big CA 2018 article to teach anyone new how to read diffs. However, for something as contentious as elections, readable diffs are critical.

I'm admittedly getting a little worn down by the discussion about splitting off election articles on the "Talk:...in_California, 2018" page. I'm not convinced by the arguments, but I'm beginning to see how the big CA 2018 article could be made better by upmerging some content from the pages that are on the block for deletion (even if we don't delete them).

It could be that the best path to take is to allow this type of article before the election, and then use the days after the dust has settled on the election to decide (on a case-by-case basis) if the article is still a) notable in its own right, or b) needs to be merged into the article about the winner of the election. I'm hoping, though, that we can keep this article around as a reasonable example of an article focused on a single district election, and that we get the opportunity to improve this (and a few others like it) to good article status.

In some ways, these comments (and my comments on the big CA 2018 article talk page) are my proto-RfC for this. I'm not sure if/how to proceed with such a thing. What form would an RfC for this topic? Where should I advertise such a thing? I think an AfD page is a terrible place to discuss it, but I'm not sure where the best place to go where healthy consensus-building can occur. -- RobLa (talk) 05:47, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Firstly, Misplaced Pages has an established consensus that there is no such thing as temporary notability. We do not do "there should be an article about this right now because it's currently in the news, and then once the dust has settled we'll deem it not notable anymore and redirect it somewhere else" — the rule is that a topic is not notable at all until you can prove that it has reached the threshold of being permanently notable forever.

Secondly, Misplaced Pages also has an established consensus that providing complete and exhaustive "every candidate in every district" coverage of elections is not our role. As an encyclopedia that anybody can edit, we are incredibly vulnerable to being abused by people who want heavily advertorialized Misplaced Pages articles for the publicity, and by people's opponents or competitors or enemies who want the first people's articles to be heavily dirtwashed with libel and slander and criticism — which is one of the reasons why we have defined notability standards to separate people who qualify for Misplaced Pages articles from people who don't. When it comes to politics, we have settled on the notability standard that officeholders are notable, while candidates are not — so it is not our job to concern ourselves with giving everybody "equal time", or with whether having articles about officeholders creates an "incumbency bias" or not. We're not a news outlet, and our job is not to create or maintain content about every single person whose name happens to be temporarily present in the current news cycle — our job is to limit ourselves to creating and maintaining articles about people who have accomplished something notable enough that people will still be looking for information about them ten years from now. That means officeholders and not candidates, it means writers who have attained significant distinctions (such as notable literary awards) and not necessarily every writer who ever had their name on the cover of a book, and on and so forth.

Literally anybody on Misplaced Pages can try to start an article about literally anything or anybody that exists at all, or even sometimes self-invented hoaxes — we have no way to stop them from trying, and all we can do is decide whether to keep it or not after it's already here. So we have to have notability standards in place to distinguish what's our role to cover and what isn't — because without those we're not an encyclopedia anymore, but just a pointless cross between a press release distribution database and a really badly-designed social networking platform. And whether you like it or not, one of the standards Misplaced Pages has decided upon is that it's not our role to give as much coverage to unsuccessful candidates for office as we do to actual officeholders, because we can't guarantee such articles the degree of maintenance that they require to stay compliant with our content rules.

And finally, as I've pointed out to you before, as a person who directly volunteered on the campaign of one of the candidates in one of these very races, you don't have enough independence from the race to be an objective judge of how notable they are to history and/or the rest of the world. Bearcat (talk) 17:16, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Delete: we really don't need to set a precedent of having individual articles for each and every congressional race. The overview pages work in most cases. Yes, in exceptional cases we should have individual articles--but this election doesn't strike me as one. There were dozens of highly contested U.S. House races in 2018; this one isn't special. Marquardtika (talk) 21:58, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
- @Marquardtika: Check out how many single House elections have their own articles in Category:United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2006. – Muboshgu (talk) 18:24, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
Delete We don't need every close House race to have its own article. This one just appears closer than the rest because the mail-in ballots come in late. Imagine if NJ-03, NC-09, OK-05, and fifty others each had their own articles. HotdogPi 23:18, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
- @HotdogPi: It's not hard to imagine. That happened in 2006: Category:United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2006. – Muboshgu (talk) 18:25, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
Merge to the main CA House 2018 article. Some of the prose should certainly be kept (and some can be excised) but there should not be articles for individual House elections unless there are extraordinary circumstances beyond being a competitive race. It would be inappropriate though to leave the section of the CA article as just a results table. Reywas92 07:13, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
Merge. I agree with Reywas92. We should merge the articles for the 10th and 39th congressional district elections to the main article, to at least keep some of the content, but these elections aren't significant enough to warrant standalone articles for them. Some of the sections for the districts in the main article should include more prose citing the competitiveness and significance of the races, but not all of it is necessary and some of it only pertains to the individual district and not the whole slate of elections in California. TNats ₃ 10:52, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

@Reywas92 and TNats3: thanks for acknowledging that some of the content is important. Once we can agree on the most logical and correct way to split up the United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2018 article (which is due for a WP:SPLIT for many reasons), I'm prepared to help with the work necessary to make that article fit into the overall structure, using WP:Summary style sections to keep the parent article from having too much detail. For example, I copied much of the important prose from this article into the Josh Harder article, thinking maybe that would be a good home for it. Muboshgu tightened it up quite a bit, so that now there is a brief WP:Summary style paragraph pointing this article. That seems like the right choice, provided that an interested reader can still find the well-sourced material in the current CA-10 election in 2018 article in a logical place on Misplaced Pages.

Dividing California along congressional district boundaries seems least contentious and most neutral, but we can try other ways. I also agree that the CA-39 election in 2018 article needs a lot of work, and that work is probably best done by people near/in/from that district that know the most about the area and the reliability of news sources about the area. However, I'm prepared to defend the level of detail in the CA-10 election in 2018 article. Would you believe that a similar level of detail would also be inappropriate for any of these other single-district articles: United States House of Representatives election in Alaska, 2018, ...in Delaware, 2018, ...in Montana, 2018, ...in North Dakota, 2018, ...in South Dakota, 2018, ...in Vermont, 2018, or ...in Wyoming, 2018? -- RobLa (talk) 18:54, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

Keep The reason for my keep vote is based on WP:SIZE. I have long suggested that there should be more prose in the election articles (including verifiable biographical information about the candidates). If we include more than one or two sentences of prose for each of California's 53 races, the size of the page is not going to be manageable. In that vein, for California, especially, but probably for most US States with 10+ districts, once we start adding detail about the race, the candidates, the district, if would be entirely appropriate for each individual race to be split into separate articles. --Enos733 (talk) 18:09, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Keep for reasons stated above. Don't merge per WP:SIZE and WP:NOTPAPER. Why not have a separate article for any race that meets WP:NOTE? This meets WP:N and probably an article on any close or contested federal election would meet WP:N. Levivich (talk) 00:15, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

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