Four questions decide whether telling someone about a deletion discussion counts as ordinary courtesy or as canvassing: who received the message, whether the sender said so openly, whether the wording argued a position or merely reported one, and how many people got it relative to the size of the venue. Wikipedia's guideline on canvassing runs entirely on those four factors. Fail any one of them and the notice becomes a violation an administrator can act on, whatever the sender intended.
A dental-clinic franchise's article went to a deletion discussion after a new-page patroller flagged its sourcing as mostly press releases and a directory listing. The franchise's marketing coordinator, who had hired us to maintain the page, posted the discussion link in a private forum for regional franchise owners: "Wikipedia is trying to delete our page — if you have a minute, drop a comment about why we're well known in your area." Seven accounts, none more than a week old, commented within two days. Five of them used some version of the same phrase: well known in the community.
The closing administrator flagged the pattern before reading past the third comment: accounts with no history outside this discussion, registered within the same week, repeating a phrase that appears nowhere in the article or its sources. Wikipedia calls this a single-purpose account, and an administrator is entitled to discount its opinion on sight, whether or not it can be traced back to a specific message. The discussion kept weighing the sourcing underneath. The seven comments simply stopped counting.
A message that only reaches people likely to agree is canvassing, however politely it's worded.
What the guideline actually allows is narrower and more mechanical than it sounds. A notice posted to the article's own talk page, to the relevant WikiProject, or to the deletion discussion's own listing page, written in neutral language that states a discussion exists without stating which way to argue, sent to whoever already watches that venue regardless of which way they're likely to lean — that clears all four questions. "An article you may be interested in has been nominated for deletion" clears it. "Our page is under attack, please help" does not, even posted to the same neutral venue.
We tell clients the distinction is most of the job: point to a discussion if you like, but don't organize a response to it. Where a subject's record can carry a keep outcome, it carries that outcome through the sources cited inside the discussion, not through the number of people who showed up to agree. Recruiting comments doesn't just fail to help the count — a closing administrator who spots the pattern reads the whole discussion for a canvassing footprint, and every legitimate comment sitting near a discounted one gets a harder look it might not have needed otherwise.
The dental-clinic discussion closed six days later as delete. The sourcing hadn't changed: a handful of press releases, a directory listing, and one regional business paper that had covered the franchise's opening five years earlier, exactly as thin as the patroller had found it. Seven comments had come and gone without touching that arithmetic once.
