Talk:List of mayors of Portland, Oregon

Bonnell

Re: recent change from "A.C. Bonnell" to "Allison Bonnell": I don't find any Allison Bonnells via Google that match Portland, all references seem to be to "A.C." Seems like an unusual name for a man, and I know Portland didn't have any female mayors that far back. Anyone know what's up? -Pete 07:41, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Political parties

Should they be included seeing that the positions are non-partisan and the candidates don't run as a member of the party? Jason McHuff (talk) 20:09, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

I highly support their inclusion, given the demographic change from a majority-Republican state and city to a majority-Democratic state and city. It is easier for readers to know the political parties of the mayors in the list instead of having to visit the articles about the mayors themselves and finding it in the infobox. MB298 (talk) 20:29, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Personally, I feel that including the party affiliation in this list is misleading, for the reason cited above by Jmchuff. At least for now, as a compromise, I have removed the column that spells out the party affiliation but retained the (relatively narrow) column that indicates party affiliation through a color – and added a note at the bottom to explain and define that column. However, I would not object at all to removal of even that column, since the Mayor of Portland is a nonpartisan office. The long-term demographic shift mentioned by MB298 is worthy of mention somewhere, but I am not convinced that this article is the place to mention it. Mentioning it in the article about the city of Portland seems more appropriate. SJ Morg (talk) 05:32, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

On the contrary. Omitting this piece of information about candidates is what's misleading. While candidates may not be running as the sole candidate of a party, they are nevertheless members of said party. Yes, the positions are non-partisan but that holds true for any political office. A US president is not the president of only his party supporters but of the entire country. The elections however are definitely not "non-partisan" nor could they ever be. Str1977 ^(talk) 11:56, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

George Luis Baker

In the case of George Luis Baker, party affiliation seems to be based on a(n apparently) inaccurate listing on his bio. As I pointed out on that page, the only reference to a political party in any of the source links says he ran unsuccessfully for Senator as a Republican, not a Democrat. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.34.135.230 (talk) 18:37, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Removal of extensive inaccurate data

This picks up a discussion that was started on the talk page of User MB298, in late December 2015. In short, last June, an anonymous editor added a huge amount of additional detail to this table – including birth & death years for each mayor and, most notably, the exact dates that each mayor entered and left office – and did not cite a source for any of it. A great many of the dates were wrong (even some birth & death years), and all of the dates for the start and end of terms were later cited to a source that gives no such info. The source only gives the date someone was "elected" mayor, not the date he or she took office, and these are often almost 2 months apart and in different years. I discussed it with MB298 in late December and stated my position that the table should go back to being a years-only table if no one came forward with supporting citations. I hoped someone else would do it, because I dislike spending my time doing major cleanup of errors introduced by anonymous editors, but was intending to do it myself after seeing, a month later, that the error had not been corrected.

I have now removed all of the unsupported information, mainly the dates that are based on a source giving the date-elected but were given here under "term start" and "term end" headings. The latter are more significant than the date of election, and the two are often in different years, so I do not support simply changing the heading of the first column to "date elected" and removing the second column. However, if someone else opts to restore the extensive exact-date details in that manner, he/she should include inline citations for every single date, because many of these dates are not given in the individual articles for each specific person. To be clear about my position, this article would be much more useful if it gave the exact dates that each mayor took office and left office, but that information needs to be cited to a reliable source, and so far, no one has been willing to the research required for that. – SJ Morg (talk) 05:25, 14 February 2016 (UTC)