Talk:Guy Barker (politician)

This article was nominated for deletion on 28 July 2022. The result of the discussion was keep.

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WP:NPOL

WP:NPOL is in favor of including "Politicians ... who have held international, national, or (for countries with federal or similar systems of government) state/province–wide office, or have been members of legislative bodies at those levels." In the United States, federally recognized tribes often function in roles equivalent to state governments (having 3 branches of gov, exercising civil and criminal jurisdiction over territory, being elected democratically by voters) and their elected politicians should fall under "similar systems of government." Given that, I think Barker actually meets WP:NPOL. He's an elected official of the Quapaw Nation and that should meet WP:NPOL.

Additionally, the Quapaw Nation has 6 people in their category, Category:Quapaw, expanding coverage is appropriate. His page is of similar length and source quality of other tribal politicians (see Milton Bluehouse Sr.). Category:Navajo Nation politicians has categories for Tribal Councilors and judges, similar coverage for other tribal nations should be in line with wiki guidelines.--TulsaPoliticsFan (talk) 17:29, 23 July 2022 (UTC) Edit: added signature later, original comment 04:29, 23 July 2022‎[reply]

@TulsaPoliticsFan: I disagree that the Quapaw nation with 13,000-acres of territory and only 3,240 (2011) enrolled tribal members has any equivalence with national legislative bodies. I think this is a clear failure to meet the guideline of NPOL based on the unsuccessful run for the US senate (he was 5th in the primary). Bruxton (talk) 13:50, 23 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't go as far to argue they are equivalent of the United States federal government, but for WP:NPOL purposes I think they're the equivalent of state/provincial office. Focusing on the size of the tribe by population or territory I think is a mistake for WP:NPOL application since there are countries smaller than the Quapaw Nation (see Niue and Vatican City). We also don't enforce size requirements for states- Wyoming has 9,000 voters in each state house district, but elected officials to the Wyoming House of Representatives still meet WP:NPOL (This article has more sourcing and content than say Jim Roscoe of Wyoming).

The logic of why WP:NPOL applies to all state elected officials should be the same for tribal governments. Especially since they are sovereign nations with jurisdiction, branches of government, and territory. Expanding the Quapaw Nation's coverage on wikipedia is also probably good post McGirt v. Oklahoma, since the tribe is now exercising criminal jurisdiction again in its reservation. Additionally, federal provisions like Treatment as States (TAS) provisions mean that tribal officials like Barker get to write environmental policy usually reserved to state or federal governments. Wiki articles on not just Barker, but tribal elected officials in the United States should meet WP:NPOL in the same way state elected officials do.

I totally understand the skepticism given his recent run for office which does not meet WP:NPOL, but I hope you WP:GOODFAITH and understand the creation of this article is motivated not by his recent run for office, but because he is a tribal elected official in Oklahoma and I'm trying to expand coverage of tribal governments as part of the Oklahoma wiki project. TulsaPoliticsFan (talk) 17:27, 23 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The question involves our WP:NPOL guideline. Should a person who is elected to any office in a Native American tribe pass the NPOL guidelines? Bruxton (talk) 22:30, 9 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm self-collapsing this side discussion about the appropriate scope and forum for the question--which discussion, while very important here, I'm going to sequester like this to avoid distraction from the the content issues. Any party may feel free to revert this hatting. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 21:32, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Comment:(Summoned by bot) Well, first off (and meaning no disrespect to your clearly good faith effort here) this is entirely the wrong place to host this RfC as it is framed. If you want to make a change to WP:NPOL itself in general, the appropriate place to do it would be the talk page for the guideline itself. If you want to establish some sort of informal presumption as to how to apply NPOL in the context of elected leaders of tribal entities (without changing the wording of NPOL itself), then you should seek that in a centralized community space such as WP:VPP. The only thing that can be determined on this talk page is a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS as to whether or not the subject of this particular article should be afforded the benefit of your proposed interpretation of NPOL. So if that is all that you are ultimately seeking here, I recommend you reformat the RfC prompt before you have further input from FRS respondents.

If, on the other hand, you want to establish a broader rule, I suggest you open a discussion on Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(people), or at VPP, and remove the RfC tag here. Again: any broader rule established here for general use in this situation, even if it got fairly uniform consensus, would not have gone through the normal policy alteration or WP:PROPOSAL processes and would not be in any way considered guiding consensus for another article in the same circumstances. (see [[WP:CONLEVEL).

And fyi, once you have settled on your approach and chosen the location for the discussion based on the scope you are seeking, I will happily come back and give my two cents, but for the moment that would just complicate your next step. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 01:40, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Snow Rise: Thank you for the comment. There are just so many back alleys in this project. I had no idea where to go with the concern but a request for comment seemed logical. My concern was that we need clarification or comment regarding the NPOL guideline because the elected office of a tribe is not specifically mentioned in the guideline. Also what office of each tribe is notable. Bruxton (talk) 03:52, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Bruxton: Sorry, for the slow reply, but I'm happy to have been of some small help! Yes, unfortunately the appropriate forums/processes for addressing particular questions can be a little opaque here! It just takes a little time to figure out where to go to address a question of a particular scope. In this particular case, I would say you have two options:

1) If you are satisfied with seeking an answer as whether or not the NPOL language applies for just Mr. Barker's, you could just continue to pursue that question here, with a slight alteration to the prompt language ("Does Guy Barker qualify for presumptive notability under NPOL, on the basis of his tribal elected official status?" or something to that effect). However, that won't necessarily protect the article from being proposed for deletion at WP:AFD, where the same question might be re-litigated. But it can't really hurt your case if an AfD comes around and you already had support here for the proposition. That said, NPOL is what we call an WP:SNG (subject-specific notability guideline), meaning it only establishes a presumption of notability for an indeterminate amount of time; eventually all articles must also comply with our WP:GNG (general notability guideline), meaning that they must be demonstrated to be the subject of substantial independent coverage in reliable sources. So bear that in mind as well.

2) You could attempt to build out the existing rules of NPOL in order to address this general question more broadly, and potentially provide guidance and consensus for future editors working on similar biographical articles of tribal leaders. This is not necessarily a bad idea, in my opinion: if it hasn't been addressed before (and you'll want to check the talk page archives for NPOL, because its possible it has) then it probably should be, because there are undoubtedly a lot of potential articles it could apply to. It's a bit more work though, and I have to say that it might be a tough sell for the advocates that the presumptive notability should apply, because the use of SNGs to greenlight otherwise non-notable articles got way out of hand for a number of years, and the community, by my observation lately, has been moving back to a stricter GNG standard for establishing notability. That said, this is a nuanced case, and the community may very well be inclined to make a carve-out here for such persons as Barker. Either way, establishing a consensus could be helpful. If you want to follow this approach, I would suggest going to the policy talk page and starting a discussion there, followed by an RfC if there is a loggerhead; if there is an RfC, you could also put a notice up at WP:VPP to get a wider swath of community attention. In fact, because of the nature of this issue, I would say you could even start the discussion on WP:VPP itself to begin with, as an alternative.

Of course, you can always pursue both lines at once: just be sure to let the participants of both discussions know that the discussions are running in parallel (one to address the specific scenario here, and one for the more general question at talk:NPOL or VPP), or else you might get accused of forum shopping after the fact, if someone didn't realize the procedural history here. I know that's a lot of moving parts, so if I have been unclear about anything above or can provide further help, please don't hesitate to ping or drop a message on my talk page! SnowRise ^{let's rap} 19:03, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: So, not withstanding the scope and forum issues discussed above, I want to address the general content question being raised. Personally, I think this is a really close call for me, and something I think bears additional community discussion--there may well have been already for all I know, but assuming there is no standing consensus reached in a general community space or on the policy talk page, I think it needs careful scrutiny. Both sides have made cogent arguments above, and I want to look a little deeper into the specifics here before I lean towards or feel I can outright endorse one position or the other. We have a tension here between applying the notability guidelines neutrally, and considering that there is context here where the elected representatives of a semi-sovreign community might not get any significant coverage. Complicating matters further is the fact that some of this positions, in terms of the scale of their responsibilities, lands somewhere between a conventional municipal officer (who would typically not meet GNG in the longterm, and only sporadically benefit from the temporary benefits of an SNG), and a typical state level representative or deputy executive official, who almost always would.

Needless to say, ultimately GNG has to be met. But is a carve-out warranted here for closer parity with similarly-situated politicians who might coast on SNGs for a while? Maybe. I was not a fan of the way SNGs were increasingly abused for a pretty substantial number of years there, like re-using a parking pass that was never renewed. And I've noticed that in the last few years while my contributions have been very sporadic, the community has more expressly than ever repudiated that approach and tightened the specific wording of SNGs. I am broadly supportive of that outlook and approach, because the habit of using SNGs as if they were an alternative to GNG (rather than a supplement to it meant to be used for niche effect) eviscerated the very point of having a notability framework based in the sourcing, and thus insulated from our idiosyncratic personal views on the innate "importance" of a topic. And yet I am hesitant here. We're talking about a culture and a polity here. No, the scope is not immense for most tribal groups, and yes the sovereignty is highly qualified, to say the least. Still, if we're going to make carve outs for anything, would this not be as good an example of a pragmatic exception? I reference WP:IAR about once every five years, because I am wary of it. But maybe here? I'm going to dig deeper for now, but felt these observations were relevant. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 21:32, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I think an RFC on this would be good, but we should work on the wording of the change a bit more. We should explicitly address distinctions between federally recognized tribes and state recognized tribes. I'd love to see more editors thoughts on this. TulsaPoliticsFan (talk) 04:03, 23 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Similar discussion happened at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Four Guns whereas people were saying Native American tribes aren't sovereign nations to have their politicians be considered notable because of small populations and others argued in return (including myself) that notion is borderline racist to penalize tribes for having small populations due to genocide by the United States. They're recognized as sovereign nations by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and treated as such when the first treaties were made with Native people. There should be an update to the WP:NPOL so Native tribes in the US (and probably elsewhere) aren't erased on Wikipedia because people lack education on what a sovereign nation means. oncamera _{(talk page)} 18:54, 23 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Oncamera: I am in agreement. Also to clarify which elected positions in the tribe would meet the SNG. Bruxton (talk) 20:55, 24 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

Guy Barker Portrait (cropped).jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 22:08, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]