Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David Marchick

David Marchick

David Marchick (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Insufficiently notable person. Fails WP:BIO in that he has not "received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject", and does not pass any sub-criterion such as WP:AUTHOR or otherwise achieve notability.

Mr Marchick falls in the category I call "ordinary accomplished person". He is accomplished and is having a fine career, but a very large number of people are similarly accomplished. Whether we want to go down the road of beginning to include such people is something that we ought to consider very carefully, I think.

From a purely policy standpoint, he's not notable, I wouldn't say. Let's drill down.

• He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. Mind you that there is an unmentioned level here, Undersecretary, so he was three levels down from the Secretary. A distinguished position to be sure, but it says here "Assistant Secretary of State is a title used for many executive positions in the United States State Department", and he was a level below that. So unless we want to greatly expand WP:DIPLOMAT this does not confer notability.
• He had desk jobs in the White House, the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce. This is nice but is very far from conferring notability. During this time, important things happened (North American Free Trade Agreement, creation of World Trade Organization) and Mr Marchick presumably did some office work connected with that, which is also nice but not germane for our purposes.
• He was a partner at a big law firm, a lobbyist, and is now a director at a large asset management firm, which are useful things to be, but not germane for our purposes.
• He's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which is good but the Council does have 4,700 members.

In my view, his notability would hinge on one of these (quite slim) threads:

1. He co-wrote a published book (at 43 pages it's really only a white paper I would infer). It may (or may not) be erudite, but it's not very well-known and hasn't garnered any reviews that I could find. Fails WP:AUTHOR by a mile; one might consider it more of an academic paper, but Mr Marchick also fails WP:ACADEMIC by a big margin.
2. He's published pieces in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal (no refs given, but let's assume that that's true). The first is out of business but the latter two are important publications. I don't know what the articles were or how many, but there's no notability criteria for writing newspaper or magazine articles per se, except WP:AUTHOR which he doesn't meet.
3. Finally, one could say "Yes, he doesn't meet WP:BIO or any of its sub-criteria in any one activity, but he's done a little of this and a little of that and taken together he's notable". I wouldn't agree with that at all, this would be a new thing for the Wikipedia, and if we want to have a policy to confer notability on persons who are just generally somewhat accomplished, we ought to create WP:ACCOMPLISHED or something as a sub-criteria for WP:BIO (and be prepared to handle an awful lot articles for doctors, lawyers, business vice-presidents, local dignitaries, etc.). The community hasn't seen fit to do that and I'd not be favor of doing it here.

I get that he's a big shot, has talked with people who are notable, is in "the club", and so forth, but I'm not seeing the Wikipedia notability here.

(N.B.: there may (or may not) be some content problems with this article, and his current employer has had a hand in the making of this article, but before tackling that I want to see if he's notable, which I don't think he is.) Herostratus (talk) 03:55, 9 October 2012 (UTC)