Talk:Mayor of Cape Town

Hi - is the "this list is incomplete" still relevant? The list of pre-1996 mayors is now complete, and there don'tseem to be any gaps in the post-1996 list? Arthur R (talk) 17:16, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Question

I'm aware that the city council elects a mayor, but are they limited to choosing someone within their own ranks on the city council, or can they choose anyone including individuals outside of the council? --Criticalthinker (talk) 11:30, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

The executive mayor must be be elected from amongst the members of the council. (Cite: Section 55 of the Municipal Structures Act.) In practise this does not restrict the choice of mayor, since half of the councillors are elected by party-list proportional representation, so the parties do not have to depend on their mayoral candidates being elected in a specific ward. - htonl (talk) 13:42, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

That fact should probably be placed somewhere within the opening paragraph(s), as I know of municipalities in some countries where the mayor can be chosen by the party in power from outside of the council. --Criticalthinker (talk) 09:03, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Irrelevant links

After checking the reference links at the bottom of this article, it appears that a number of them are not relevant. For example, link 18 directs to a tourism website of Bredasdorp, which has nothing to do with the surname, "van Breda". Several links are broken and I've flagged this article as out of date. 41.208.10.82 (talk) 12:15, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

That Bredasdorp link contains the sentence "Bredasdorp is named after Michiel van Breda, who was a leading member of the community in the 1800s and the first mayor of Cape Town," which is why it is used as a reference here. Anyway, {{out of date}} isn't the appropriate tag, since the information in the article isn't out of date. I've added a {{dead links}} flag, because you're right about there being a lot of broken links, but I'm going to remove the {{out of date}} flag. - htonl (talk) 14:02, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for that, and your recommendation is noted. I'd like to propose that this site be deleted. Some of the content, like the logo, is out of date and the links do not direct to useful information. Most of the links which are not broken are either bizarre or completely random. This article is also being used to populate a Facebook site and has generated some negative publicity. The City of Cape Town is obviously concerned that a professional image is projected and this article falls well short in this department. There are other, more accurate sites which provide details of the mayor of Cape Town which are of greater value. It would be better if the reader was directed to these sites instead of landing here. Please let me know if you have any objections - and are willing to do the work to update this site? 41.208.10.82 (talk) 10:35, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm declining the proposed deletion because the topic of the mayor of Cape Town meets Wikipedia's notability requirements, and the fact that the City doesn't like the content is not relevant to deletion. If the logo is out of date, that can be removed or replaced. If there is other information that is wrong or out of date, that can be corrected. If there are other sites with better information, please point them out: that information could be used to improve this article. (Incidentally, I think you've possibly misunderstood the point of the links in the reference section: they aren't general links about the topic of the article; they're there to back up specific facts in the article, as indicated by the little numbers indexing the references, which correspond with numbers in the article that look like ^[1].)

The PR concerns of the City are not really something that will influence editing decisions at Wikipedia. (If, as it appears, you work for or represent the City you should read our conflict of interest policy.) But of course we welcome any changes that will improve the article. - htonl (talk) 11:42, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

(Also, sorry for the generic "undo" message when removing the proposed deletion tag; I meant to leave a more explanatory message there but my fingers fumbled on the keyboard.) - htonl (talk) 11:45, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, and for neatening up the article. I have no particular objection with retaining the page but this article would do better to be merged with other, more substantial City sites such as can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_cape_town. It seems pointless to maintain what is really an orphan site.

The links are now much improved but perhaps I can explain what the problem is with those that remain. In an ideal world, references would direct to an authoritative source that serves to substantiate the citation. In the case of this set of reference links, the reader is presented with redirects to sites such as an Armistice Day blog (link 4), a Geocities site (link 7 - one of the better links, depressingly), and a tourism website (link 9). These links cannot be considered hard evidence by any stretch. Reference 8 does not make it clear what kind of reference this is - I assume the citation is for a printed book? And I'm not at all sure what the purpose of including the first two links is - sensationalism? It would be better to replace these with reference links which actually support the text. What they certainly do not do is provide any form of reliable backing, which is the purpose of reference links (cf. your comment above). I'd like to believe that one of Wikipedia's aims is to provide user content which rises above this paltry level. Why not promote the pages which do offer better quality content? Repairing the site to meet these standards seems not worth the effort, hence my suggestion for its deletion. Retaining it simply because the topic meets a notability requirement ignores the poor quality of the content. The next best option - and a way to retain the information that is useful - is to merge it with the site cited above. Thoughts? 41.208.10.82 (talk) 13:19, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

If there are better citations, feel free to provide these. Blogs, Geocities etc are not great references, but in the absence of anything more authoritative they remain. The first two links are presumably causing embarrassment because they mention a previous mayor watching porn, but Independent Newspapers counts as an authoritative source, and the pages provide a reliable source for the names of the mayors, so it's understandable why these exist. They could just as easily be replaced by any other equally reliable source. Merging the page (just a point of clarity, Wikipedia has 'pages', not 'sites') with the much broader City of Cape Town page or deleting it is unlikely to happen, as this page serves a specific purpose with a specific, focused scope. Greenman (talk) 17:12, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I think we agree on the fundamentals, and if I am able to provide more reliable sources then that solves the main gripe. I will work on replacing them in due course. 41.208.10.82 (talk) 07:02, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

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