Recently, @Yoblyblob has nominated several local election articles for deletion (see list below), citing notability concerns. This struck me as curious, since local election articles have existed for years without much scrutiny regarding their notability (as far as I remember). The sudden wave of AfDs has prompted me to start this discussion: Are local elections notable enough to warrant standalone articles?
I'm not particularly involved in political editing, but I am genuinely curious about the notability standards being applied here, especially in light of this recent trend.
Here's the articles currently listed on AfD:
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}} AstrooKai (Talk) 10:10, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
:I suspect the information is worth including, although it's somewhat unexpected to see the 2016, 2019, and 2022 articles never having been updated from the "Voters will select candidates". CMD (talk) 10:28, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
:@AstrooKai I came across some local elections while going through new pages for WP:NPP. I was honestly surprised that they did not have any concerns tagged at the top of the page. Local elections are not automatically notable, we cannot assume there is significant coverage for each of these. Not all local elections are not notable though, there are several I have found that seem to have plenty of sourcing. I came across these and saw for some of them that they only listed primary results, which was a red flag, so I looked them up to find other sources, and found very little, or sometimes even nothing beyond primary sources. I have noticed there are some pages on local elections in a region of the country, combining those all into a page, which could be a potential solution to still including these results somewhere. Just because we have information on something does not mean it deserves a page though, which is why I nominated these. Yoblyblob (Talk) :) 11:17, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
:Our standard for elections is WP:GNG. With being said, elections from first level subdivisions like provinces and independent cities can be made somewhat easily. For second level subdivisions such as component cities amd municipalities (such as these), it is much harder to write anything about these.
:With that being said, it's quite harder to write about these now after the ABS-CBN shutdown, and that local press have been losing money for years now (e.g. Baguio Midland Courier). Most have exclusively publish on Facebook now instead of independent websites and Wikipedia doesn't take kindly to that.
:For the 2025 local elections, somebody made a series of artifles classified per region, and I having those split to per province and independent city. Howard the Duck (talk) 11:45, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
::@Howard the Duck they should not all be split into individual pages, it seems several of them to not meet WP:GNG. Some may be deserving of their own page, but not all Yoblyblob (Talk) :) 16:15, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
:::To explain further, the 2025 local elections series were organized by region. This was imitated from the congressional series. Local elections except for 1 region are not organized at the local level but first through provinces, then cities and municipalities. While congressional elections can be lumped together via regions (so only 17 articles in that series), local elections have a different dynamic, and are indeed primarily organized via "local government unit" of which regions are not. This means, for example, 2025 Philippine local elections in the Ilocos Region should be split into 2025 Ilocos Norte elections, 2025 Ilocos Sur elections, and so on. Howard the Duck (talk) 16:48, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
:::These 2025 local election series primarily rely on primary references anyway, so do not pass WP:GNG. It is conceivable someone can write up prose on 81 provincial elections and around 30 or so independent city elections, then probably individual mayoral results can also coattail on these articles. Howard the Duck (talk) 16:55, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
:::With all due respect, of the 18 regions we have, by what parameter does one regional-level election get to be deemed non-notable? Borgenland (talk) 16:59, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
::::There's no regional level election save for one, the 2025 Bangsamoro Parliament election.
::::Organizing local elections via regions was a mistake and should had been done per province and independent city. Howard the Duck (talk) 17:01, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
:As far as I’m concerned province level elections are notable enough. And having them nominated for such tags is a bit questionable given the double standards it might entail vis-a-vis other subnational divisions. The one thing that’s lacking though is prose and unquantifiable data such as events and issues, to which I have had the gruesome task of having to document election violence (unfortunately a part of life here). Borgenland (talk) 12:39, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
