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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. J04n(talk page) 23:24, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Rotary Club of Milton

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The Rotary Club of Milton (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Article shouldn't have been moved to mainspace from AfC. This is a local organization, notable, if at all, only for a small locale, and it is excessive in its detail and promotional in its tone. There are thousands of Rotary clubs, and only few of them could possible be independently notable: this does not appear to be one of them. With my apologies to Milton. Drmies (talk) 17:56, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep and Clean-up Neutral. The article clearly demonstrates that its subject has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources (local newspapers). Several of those references are to reader's letters and should therefore be removed, but most of the references are fine. The article is obviously too verbose, it doesn't need to go into so much detail. That detail is the job of the subject's website, not a wikipedia article. —gorgan_almighty (talk) 18:37, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Retain Article & Clean Up. Hello user Drmies. I am the original creator of this page. Thank you for your concerns. I have worked extensively with user GATechnical and several other users to make this new entry compliant. The page was originally rejected for not being unique or notable enough to warrant its own page. Much of the detail added relates to notable supporters over the years who are of great prominence including Walter Gretzky, Douglas Porter, Johnny Bower and many others.
The level of detail is meant to chronicle the club's history and is not intended to be promotional. Perhaps we can work on any of the semantics you find questionable. The detailed chronology is a factual representation of work completed. Service clubs by definition are agents of good works, so to construe a listing of good works as promotion is misguided. No offence.
Notable supporters alone I understand is not enough to justify a club's own page. However, the Milton club in particular is unique and notable among worldwide Rotary clubs for its demographics. The greatest of these demographic trends is increasing club membership while worldwide service club membership is decreasing, especially in North America. All of this is fact and supported by references in the article. For your information here is the notable attributes:
  • Situated in Milton, Ontario, the fastest growing community in Canada since 2001 (71.4% growth 2001-2006 and 56.4% growth 2006-2011), in one of the largest population concentrations in North America, southern Ontario's Golden Horseshoe, giving it explosive potential for membership growth (in six months club membership has grown by 30%). This is bucking worldwide trends as many clubs' membership numbers are in complete "freefall". *Selected to be one of fewer than 200 clubs worldwide (0.0058% of all clubs) to participate in a Rotary International pilot program that supports member diversity by allowing the club to hold two weekly meetings via a satellite club instead of one (a breakfast meeting and a supper meeting) to attract different types of members (small business owners vs. commuting professionals). As a result the Milton club's membership is now 35% female and 17% visible minorities. Prior to 1990, the club was 100% white male Rotarians.
  • For its early adoption among Rotary clubs and widespread, effective use of social media (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Website, etc.)
  • For selecting one of the youngest club presidents in Rotary International for the 2014-2015 year who will be aged 31 by the time he holds office. Worldwide members under the age of 39 years old make up only 11% of total global membership.
From a purely objective standpoint, this club deserves its own page. Over two months of edits and justifications have been made in support of this page, not just by myself, but others as well who are unaffiliated with the club. I cannot see a flood of individual Rotary clubs being able to justify their own pages if that's the concern.
Bottomline I'd like to improve the article and I'm more than happy to work with the community to make it the best it can be. I am a team player who wants to contribute to the Wiki community to make it the best it can be. All the best, Rod McLachlan (talk) 18:51, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You need to gather sources that aren't local, and show us what there is. You are in the best position to find those sources, IRWolfie- (talk) 20:37, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or Merge to Milton, Ontario. I disagree with Gorgan almighty that the club has received significant coverage to pass WP:ORG. It has received many mentions in the local paper, but seemingly no significant coverage - only mentions of what the organisation is doing. As WP:BRANCH states, the coverage would need to include sources outside of the local area for the group to be notable. The most sensible solution in my opinion is to take a few of the best sources and use them to reference the material already included at Milton,_Ontario#Service_Clubs. SmartSE (talk) 18:56, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I've started making some large clean-up changes to the article, assuming the article is kept. Firstly, the club event photos are entirely inappropriate and have been removed. Secondly the timeline was too verbose and didn't limit its content well enough. I've now started re-writing it to include major activities only, and in sentence form not bullet-point form. Thirdly the huge list of previous presidents was inappropriate and has been removed. I don't have much time now, so feel free to continue these changes yourself, particularly to the Activities section. Particularly, consider changing it to have a separate sub-section for each activity (such as the park) instead of a separate sub-section for each decade. —gorgan_almighty (talk) 19:13, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • That is certainly an improvement, but I don't see what can be salvaged. It's basically just a list of all the donations that they have made, which doesn't seem encyclopedic to me. It belongs on the club's website (which Rod appears to contribute to) but not here. That also lead me to notice that Rod appears to be the PR director and president elect - that doesn't make any difference as to whether we keep the article or not, but people might want to know. SmartSE (talk) 20:39, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hi Smartse. Thanks for the heads up on policy. I leave it in the hands of the community. I have never hidden the fact that I was affiliated with the club. The club is not a commercial enterprise and is a non-profit, with nothing to gain financially here. I will continue to comply with all Wikipedia rules and regulations. Whether the article is fit for inclusion or not shouldn't rest on whether I created it or not. I made every effort to write it in a non-promotional, unbiased tone. I continue to encourage others to edit it to make it compliant. I consistently stated facts backed by media sources and not opinions. Clearly only someone with knowledge of the club could put that article together or would even spend that many hours working on it and sourcing those citations.
I hope the community can objectively make a decision and I will abide by that. At the end of the day the Milton Rotary Club is a bunch of people trying to have a positive impact on the world. There's no fame or glory. Just hard work for the benefit of others. I'll be staying out of the discussion from here on out. All the best, Rod McLachlan (talk) 21:31, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delete - the 'weak' is a sop to the authors, because the Club evidently has a strong relationship with the (reputable) local newspaper and, unlike many articles about companies and organisations, there are plenty of news articles cited. I can see some effort has been expended to create a passable article. However, WP:CORPDEPTH applies here, some evidence of regional or national attention is required. If one regional or national news source could be found, I'd change my 'vote' to "weak keep". It is clear at the moment the article's intention is to promote a local club, of no significance outside the town. Sionk (talk) 23:02, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm not even concerned with the (obvious) promotional character of the article--that's just a matter of editing. The problem is that there is nothing else: there is nothing regional or national, nothing we consider of encyclopedic value. I could fill pages and pages on the local chapter of United Way, but it'd be all local. Rod, it doesn't matter if your club works for good or evil. What matters is WP:GNG--coverage. Drmies (talk) 23:40, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - the standard to be applied here is WP:ORGDEPTH (as has been pointed out), along with the understanding that for the purposes of WP:N, multiple publications from the same source are to be considered one source. So the long list of references from the same newspaper doesn't actually do much to establish notability. There's plenty of local coverage, but nothing to suggest the club is recognised as a significant organisation beyond that town. WP:LOCAL comes to mind and the section Audience at WP:ORGDEPTH covers that more specifically. Unless significant regional or national coverage can be found, I think this is going to be a struggle. I also have WP:NOTWEBHOST concerns about long sections of local club history. Stalwart111 00:44, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ontario-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:41, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:41, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I have cleaned up the verbose language in the 1970's, 80's, 90's, 2000's, and 2010's and deleted unnecessary information. I have re-instated the "Demographics" section as is vital for showing the unique and notable nature of this particular club and justifies its inclusion on Wikipedia. I do not wish to further comment. Only mentioning this as it was listed as a concern with the article. Rod McLachlan (talk) 04:01, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate your efforts but a unique or unusual membership base is not really a basis on which an organisation would be considered notable. Even if those people were individually notable (in whatever regard), the organisation would still not inherit notability from its members. Those sorts of things are interesting and can be included in the article, but they don't really contribute to the subject's notability.
Though I'm hesitant to encourage prose clean-up in an article I think should be deleted, the mixture of past and present tense is confusing. If the article is kept, you might want to spend some time working on that. I've also amended your note heading - you need only "vote" once. Stalwart111 04:37, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I originally removed the Demographics section because I don't see its content as appropriate. The only bit of actual demographics there is the facts and figures relating to Milton, which isn't really relevant to the club and sounds like you're trying to 'borrow' the notability of Milton itself to establish notability for the club. The rest of it isn't demographics, and certainly doesn't establish notability. The only bit of useful information in that section is the pilot program participation, which I already incorporated below the first paragraph. The pilot program participation doesn't establish notability, but at least it's appropriate to the article. —gorgan_almighty (talk) 13:32, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I'm not going to argue further for keeping this article, but I'm still uneasy about the arguments put forward. Restrictions on local sources and singular sources establishing notability are both more restrictive than the general notability guideline, and there is by no means universal acceptance of such additional restrictions. Additionally, the question of whether local notability constitutes 'real' notability is certainly a topic worthy of discussion, but with the absence of clear universally accepted guidance on the matter, I think deletions based on the assumption that it doesn't are risky. For example, how do you define the cut-off when something becomes 'local'? How big should the 'local' area be before it is no longer 'local'? —gorgan_almighty (talk) 13:32, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not really sure what you mean when you say there has not been, "universal acceptance of such additional restrictions"...
  • "Multiple publications from the same author or organization are usually regarded as a single source for the purposes of establishing notability." is from WP:GNG itself.
  • "On the other hand, attention solely from local media, or media of limited interest and circulation, is not an indication of notability; at least one regional, national, or international source is necessary." is from WP:ORGDEPTH.
I would say both of those consensus-developed policies/guidelines are fairly universally accepted. Is it the combination you have a concern with? Stalwart111 13:48, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
WP:GNG also says:
  • "We require the existence of at least one secondary source so that the article can comply with Wikipedia:No original research's requirement that all articles be based on secondary sources."
Obviously multiple reliable sources are better, and the line below the one I quoted indicates that, but it is not a strict rule that requires deletion of an otherwise acceptable article. Also note that guidelines like WP:ORGDEPTH, etc, are not universally accepted. They are guidelines not policies, and anyone can write a notability guideline. In fact many WikiProjects insist on writing notability guidelines to cover their own articles, some of which are more restrictive, some are less restrictive, and others are simply incompatible with the WP:GNG. The fact that some notability guidelines are marked as accepted means that they have received a not-insignificant level of acceptance, but they are not universally accepted. There have in the past been moves to downgrade all notability guidelines other than WP:GNG to the status of essays. These attempts were met with stalemate, rather than defeat. WP:GNG is unique in that it is the only notability guideline that has achieved almost universal acceptance. —gorgan_almighty (talk) 15:01, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I get where you're coming from. I think we probably disagree on the universality of acceptance for long-established guidelines like WP:ORGDEPTH but yours is an entirely valid argument. For me, what's there isn't enough, but I can certainly see how you came to your conclusion and I'm not about to suggest it's the "wrong" one - just different to mine. Stalwart111 21:38, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - The Rotary Club of Milton may be a fine organisation, but coverage only in the local community paper is insufficient to establish notability. -- Whpq (talk) 18:24, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I put on Twitter a post saying Wikipedia is proposing to delete The Rotary Club of Milton page and asked people to re-tweet my message if they were OPPOSED to the proposed deletion. So far I have received retweets from:
  • @MEVCOntario (Milton Executive Volunteer Connection A connection for residents of Milton, Ontario who volunteer with organizations in Milton at the Board Level)
  • @nmfarrugia (founding President of the Milton Rotaract Club)
  • @MiltonHardware (Milton Home Hardware)
  • @RickDiLorenzo (Councillor)
  • @kimmacd1971 (Optimist Club of Milton)
Rod McLachlan
  • You're having a laugh aren't you? This isn't a reality TV show. This AfD will be decided based on Wikipedia policy, not fan votes on Twitter! Sionk (talk) 21:13, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oh, wow. Rod, I know you're new and I can see why you might have thought that canvassing community/business contacts on Twitter might have seemed like a good idea, but it's actually considered really poor form here. As Sionk said, these discussions aren't even based on vote-counting on Wikipedia, so they certainly won't be bassed on vote-counting off Wikipedia. Those messages really can't be considered in any context here, if for no other reason than none of those messages would be considered Wikipedia-policy-based reasons for keeping the article. Probably a bell that can't be unrung now. Stalwart111 22:07, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete There's nothing worth merging; it should be listed in the town article, but there is no point in making a redirect, it is where anyone would look without one.
Our new contributor is perfectly correct that we can make exceptions to our guidelines, including the notability guideline, and that we have established general exceptions to it, some written in formal guidelines, some in the degree to which various essays are accepted, and some in conventions that we don't have actually written. It is also true that the actual meaning of the guidelines depends in many cases on the way we interpret particular phrases, such as "significant" coverage, which can vary for different sorts or articles and is to some extent a matter of judgement. He is also correct that we have the ability to ignore the guideline altogether in whatever direction, whenever we think it will benefit Wikipedia and have sometimes explicitly decided to do so. He doesn't say, but it is also true, that we have occasionally made eccentric decisions and even downright errors, again in various directions. So he is right to raise the question of whether our guideline against local clubs or local branches of national clubs makes sense, whether our present normal strict exclusion of local sources and 'significant" coverage for this particular topic area is correct, whether we should consider some of the other factors he mentions, and whether we should make an exception in this particular case.
I think that our standing practices for this topic are very reasonable:there is almost no case where the doings of such clubs is of any concern except to their own members. They all engage in the usual civic ceremonies; they all support the local charities; they all make the usual contributions to causes in vogue at the time. They are part of the ordinary civic life and structure of the local community, but in a way that is of interest only to the most local of local historians. Nobody other than the people in their town would ever have any concern with them. When we have local wikipedias, they would be appropriate content.
This is not primarily my personal view: it is the consensus of WPedians in general established through multiple guideline discussions and thousands of AfDs. I fully accept this consensus, and accept it as the only way to have any degree of quality control. We have enough problems with groups of more than local interest.
I see no reason to make an exception here. There is nothing in the article of special or general interest. It just confirms the general view--if with all this conscientious work nothing more can be found, we have confirmed that we have good reason to exclude such articles. We can only apologize that he was encouraged to continue work on the article by a reviewer at AfC who showed not just here but elsewhere that he does not understand our standards. We are now trying to explain this to him, and have told him not to conduct further reviewing until he does understand better. But it is our fault we did not do this earlier. Personally, I think we need formal standards before people can review AFCs. In their absence,we need to at least keep track of the people doing this, and help them learn before they get other people involved in doing work that will be to no purpose DGG ( talk ) 00:29, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As I already commented above, there is no such universal consensus. —gorgan_almighty (talk) 11:55, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's generally accepted that local sources with standard news can't show notability in the world at large, IRWolfie- (talk) 14:59, 10 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Except for something from the diagnostic imaging people at a local hospital, all coverage is from newspapers and other news sources that are reporting things as news. Wikipedia isn't the newspaper, and so we need our sources to be time-independent of the subject: please give us some coverage in books or academic journals. Alternately, it would work to provide national or provincial governmental sources: local sources generally aren't independent of the subject. Lacking all of those things, we can't keep this article. Nyttend (talk) 16:04, 10 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete This is a laudable but run-of-the-mill local service club. I mean that respectfully; it's a good club full of good people, but it does not meet the criteria for a separate article in an international encyclopedia. I personally belong to a local Kiwanis club which is older than this one and has done more notable stuff, but I would never dream of creating an article about it. See WP:BRANCH: "As a general rule, the individual chapters of national and international organizations are usually not considered notable enough to warrant a separate article - unless they are substantially discussed by reliable independent sources that extend beyond the chapter's local area. " --MelanieN (talk) 22:32, 12 March 2013 (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.
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