Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia proposals

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Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums

There's been an ongoing debate on pages for elections in the US about what kind of sourcing you need to move a candidate from the "Filed paperwork" or "Potential" section to "Declared." A lot of editors seem to agree that an FEC filing is not enough, because it is very common for people to file with the FEC without ever actually campaigning. Ideally, we want to cite a news article that says the candidate is running. However, it's easy to find candidates who've filed with the FEC and launched a campaign website but who haven't been mentioned in any news articles. Moreover, some news articles say that a candidate is running purely because they've filed with the FEC, even though the candidate has no online campaign presence and the author of the news article doesn't seem to have reached out to them to confirm they're actually running. In my eyes, there are three proposals for how to deal with this:

1. Maintain the current system. A candidate can only be moved to "Declared" if there is an article from a reliable news source that says they're running.

2. Allow someone to be listed in "Declared" if they have filed with the FEC or the relevant state/local elections agency.

3. Allow someone to be listed in "Declared" with two citations: first, a filing with the FEC or the relevant state/local elections agency, and second, a self-published source from the candidate that says they're running--e.g. a campaign website, campaign social media account, or fundraising page where the candidate explicitly says they're running (so "I'm exploring a candidacy" or something like that wouldn't be good enough).

Which do you think is the best path? BottleOfChocolateMilk (talk) 15:57, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

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