Talk:Kate Trotter

Is she really notable?

Is Kate Trotter really notable? Are her roles in the (many) TV shows SIGNIFICANT (ie principal or at least recurring characters), or are they incidental guest-appearances like in Friday the 13th: The Series? And, does she have a large fan-base or cult following? And, has she made unique, prolific or innovative contributions to her field? Those are the three criteria I see on Wikipedia: NACTOR. Opinions, please. HandsomeMrToad (talk) 05:45, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

For starters, she does not only have TV appearances, but has also acted in film and on stage — but you seem bent on ignoring that and concentrating only on the question of whether she's ever been the primary star of a TV series or not, which is not the controlling factor. If there are also films and stage roles in the mix, then we consider them all and not just the TV work alone. Tru Love, for just one example, is a film in which she was a major character; Joshua Then and Now is another.

Secondly, one of the things that Wikipedia accepts as a "unique contribution to her field" is being singled out for nominations and/or wins of major top-level awards in that field. For a Canadian actress working in Canada, that means the old pre-2012 Gemini Awards for television, the old pre-2012 Genie Awards for film, the merged post-2012 Canadian Screen Awards for television and film and the Dora Mavor Moore Awards for theatre — and she has (a) a Gemini win, (b) three other Gemini nominations, (c) two ACTRA Award nominations, and (d) at least one Dora nomination (but our Dora coverage is incomplete at present, so she may still have even more of those than I can confirm yet.) She also has an Iris Prize win for Tru Love, for that matter, and that's a British award. Major awards = special achievements = unique contributions to her field.

And thirdly, the significance of a role, for the purposes of whether a person qualifies under the "significant roles" criterion, is determined by whether she can be reliably sourced as the subject of media coverage for the roles, not by anybody's personal opinion about whether the roles were big or small ones — a person can have a non-speaking walk-on role, and still be notable for that under the roles criterion if film critics singled the appearance out in their reviews of the film as being its scene-stealing highlight (e.g. Judi Dench actually won an Oscar for a three-minute cameo appearance at the end of Shakespeare in Love, so that's quite clearly one of her notability-conferring roles regardless of its length), and a person can be the star of a small indie film and not get an article for that if they and the film got no media coverage. It's the amount of media coverage that can be shown to get a person over WP:GNG for the having of roles, not anybody's personal assessments of how major or minor the roles were, that mark the difference between a role that counts as NACTOR material and a role that doesn't.

So the way notability works for actors and actresses, she has two of those criteria completely covered off: award wins and nominations that count as unique contributions to her field by virtue of constituting special achievements, and enough referencing to clear WP:GNG as having media coverage about her having of acting roles. And again, TV, film and stage roles are all fair game, not just TV roles to the exclusion of the others.

And incidentally, I'm a Wikipedia administrator who's been contributing here for 15 years, which means that I've been around here a lot longer than you have, and my understanding of Wikipedia's notability criteria is correct, because I was personally involved in drafting a lot of them and discussing the ways in which they needed to be tightened when they were too loose. So I'm pretty close to the last person on Wikipedia you want to condescend to with an "I know the rules better than you do" attitude or the "maybe you're new around here" snark you threw at me on my user talk page — because you clearly don't actually understand how NACTOR is actually applied if you think there's a notability problem here. Bearcat (talk) 16:27, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

RE: "Tru Love, for just one example, is a film in which she was a major character; Joshua Then and Now is another."

But is either of those films NOTABLE???

RE: "I'm a Wikipedia administrator who's been contributing here for 15 years, which means that I've been around here a lot longer than you have, and my understanding of Wikipedia's notability criteria is correct, because I was personally involved in drafting a lot of them and discussing the ways in which they needed to be tightened when they were too loose. So I'm pretty close to the last person on Wikipedia you want to condescend to with an "I know the rules better than you do" attitude"

Were you also personally involved in drafting the "assume good faith" and "be polite to other editors" and "resist the urge to personalize editing-disputes" guidelines? Just wondering.

Best, HandsomeMrToad (talk) 21:23, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Er, yes, both of those are notable films, as evidenced by the fact that they both have Wikipedia articles which properly source that they pass WP:NFILM by virtue of having both notable awards and WP:GNG-passing coverage under their belts. And nothing I said above violates any of "assume good faith", "be polite to other editors" or "resist the urge to personalize editing disputes". Bearcat (talk) 21:40, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

As Butters frequently says on "South Park": "Well, all right then." HandsomeMrToad (talk) 03:28, 11 June 2018 (UTC)