Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Caroline Dunsmore

I was asked a question about the close, and I copy the talkpage conversation here:

Hi, this AfD seems to be a clear no consensus which in my understanding should default to keep rather than delete. Could you reconsider this decision? -- Banjeboi 11:05, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is a complicated one to answer. When closing a discussion, and administrator generally only has recourse to reading rough consensus. This, however, is a biography of a living person, and the appropriate section of the deletion guidelines for administrators obliges us to consider the BLP policy in addition to this rough consensus. In a sense, the discussion indicated to me that there was the usual WP:NOT#NEWS argument vs. the WP:N notability argument. Bearing in mind that an administrator is meant to weigh comments carefully when the guideline/policy quoted is incorrectly used, I noted that the keep arguments did not refute the portion of the portion of WP:N that indicates that short-burst news stories are an exemption to the general notability guideline. So I considered outright closing this as delete, but I think I'd be receiving endless messages on my page if I had done! :)

If there had been a merge target to shift the material to an article about the trials, etc. as was suggested implicitly within the discussion, I might have done so, but there is little or no material in the article beyond a mini-biography of the convict in question, so a merge would have been unsuitable as it would still be a biography under a different name, which prompts all kinds of WP:BLP1E and WP:COATRACK-type issues that are rightly discouraged by our BLP policy.

At the end of the day, because notability was ambiguous, and on my required assessment of the article against our WP:BLP policy per the guidelines for deletion, the deletion of the article seemed the reasonable outcome of the discussion. My wording of "no consensus - default to delete" was intended more to reflect the fact that I had been obliged to look past the rough consensus (there was none in my reading of the discussion) and also examine the BLP issues. I am happy to discuss this point further with you if you have any other questions or concerns about it - apologies for the length! Fritzpoll (talk) 12:40, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]