Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Angela Beesley (3rd nomination)
I'd keep a scary proportion of relatively long-deceased people so long as their articles were very well-sourced (long-forgotten local bigwigs of no national importance and little lasting legacy are A-OK by me). I guess at least it's conceivable that a local history buff could find such articles worthwhile; and even if they are rarely edited that'd be fine since there'd be relatively little fresh source information to draw on anyway. Even if nobody looked at it for 5 years, it may turn out to be just the obscure person that the next reader was looking for, and to find a well-referenced article on the subject could be extremely useful to them. On the other hand, when faced with a modern person (and at the back of my mind the fact they don't want to be listed lingers) I set the bar far higher. The absurdly poor state of this article, the poor referencing etc. is, in theory, a matter for cleanup not AFD. But still part of me thinks: what's the point of cleaning this article up? What information, or useful way of seeing information, will be saved by doing so? Miss Beesley has played a part, if we wish to aggrandize ourselves, in shaping the history of the internet, but only as a cog in the bigger machine of the Foundation and the online communities she has interacted with. This article will never explain, nor should it attempt to, the way that cog turned, the gears it meshed with, the times things ran smoothly, and the times more oil should have been applied... that would all fall short of  and  (at least until some biographies get published, but heck, I doubt that'll happen any time soon, and no, a blog does ''not'' count as a "serial biography"). Without that, though, I'm afraid there's really nothing left to be said. ''That'' was precisely what her role in "notable" history has been. We can have her date of birth (ooh, is that a reference I can see for it? Ummm... no) and place of birth (aha, a reference! oops, my mistake) and even find out which university she went to (so long as you'll believe anything you'll see uncited in an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit"). Oh yes, and she has the sort of picture that drive anon IPs to leave unwholesome messages on her talk page; but so long as we don't go down the :de: route and scrap fair use images entirely, they can always check out a certain J. Wales's former employees instead. In summary, what would be lost from leaving an unlinked "Angela Beesley", heck, even an "A. Beesley", in the articles where she's relevant? I can't see any "notable information loss". And deleting articles like this is a surefire way to boost our average factual accuracy. And indeed, to get back closer to the "anyone can edit" philosophy (which Angela would espouse, I am sure), so long as the back end of that was an "and also anyone can nominate non-notable living people biographies for deletion
— User:TheGrappler, 09:37, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
Stance: delete
Cited policy: WP:V||WP:NOR (Wikipedia:Verifiability)