Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Catherine Lynch (2nd nomination)

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 no consensus. The automatic headcount is 33 keep, 20 delete and 3 merge. Under these circumstances, the arguments for deletion would need to be very persuasive, or those for keeping very weak, to allow me to close this discussion with a consensus for deletion. The same applies, vice versa, with respect to a consensus for keeping. I do not think that this is the case.

The core issue here is whether these women, who were apparently quite ordinary people (or ordinary petty criminals) from around 1900, are notable because their lives were covered in a modern local historian's book, in addition to local newspapers and official records of the period. In most AfDs in which notability is the issue, editors can in good faith disagree about whether a given number of sources of a given quality are sufficient to support an article. This AfD is an example in point, with many valid policy- or guideline-based arguments made on both sides. Ultimately this is a matter of editorial judgment, and one about which we seem to broadly disagree. The uncommon number of well-reasoned neutral opinions do indicate that this is a bit of an edge case, or just a very novel one.

Additionally, there is quite a bit of discussion about historiography and our role in it. While we don't have as many alphabet-soup rules about that as we do about notability, here again I think that both sides make valid points that might merit a broader discussion. While these three articles are now kept by default, and I can't really envisage a consensus forming about their inclusion in a renomination any time soon, there might be a point in creating an RfC about some of the broader issues discussed here should a substantial number of similar articles be created and contested. Sandstein 18:57, 19 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]